Aldiss, Brian W - White Mars

WHITE MARS Or, The Mind Set Free A 21st-Century Utopia

BRIAN W. ALDISS in collaboration with

ROGER PENROSE

Editorial Reviews Amazon.com

White Mars is, as its title implies, Brian Aldiss's considered reply to the novels Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, in which Kim Stanley Robinson portrayed the terraforming of our neighbor planet and the creation of a utopian society there. Aldiss disapproves of the whole idea of meddling with another world in the first place, and, more genially, of the melodrama surrounding the creation of Robinson's utopia. Where Robinson's Martians get their chance after near-genocidal warfare on Mars and environmental disaster on Earth, Aldiss's get theirs as the result of a corruption- and scandal-fuelled recession in which supplies for the Martian colony are cut. This is, unusually for the shrewd and sometimes cynical Aldiss, a novel with a hero--Tom Jeffreys, the Thomas Jefferson of this Martian revolution: His manner was less severe than well controlled. He showed great determination for the cause in which he believed, yet softened it with humour, which sprang from an innate modesty. He was not above self-mockery. In his speech he adopted the manner of a plain man, yet what he said was often unexpected. This is a very English, very urbane book, in which there is an awful lot of talk--about utopia, about consciousness, about subatomic particles; Aldiss collaborated on parts of the book with mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose. It is a wise book and a knowledgeable one. --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk From Publishers Weekly

Aldiss (Hothouse; the Helliconia Trilogy) is one of the most important SF writers of the 20th century and a noted mainstream novelist and literary critic as well, but this largely unsuccessful excursion into utopian narrative is unlikely to win him many new admirers. Written in collaboration with the distinguished physicist Sir Roger Penrose, with the noted authority on international law Laurence Lustgarten bylined as "legal advisor," the book is less a novel than a series of long-winded debates... read more Customer Reviews Avg. Customer Review:

charcters, November 25, 2001 Reviewer :

i need some information about the main charcters for a project please send me some information please. Not the best Aldiss novel for me, November 2, 2001 Reviewer :

For this novel, in fact, I think 3 stars is a bit generous, although 2 would be too harsh. There are some interesting flashes, but too much of it is philosophising in a preachy sort of way, and when science fiction takes its stand with Chimborazo it seems almost out of place. Most of this novel seems to be set in a desert anywhere on the Earth - I had none of the real alien feel that Mars should give, as so well done by Philip K Dick and C S Lewis

in radically different ways, even Ray Bradbury - and who can forget Samuel Delany's 'Triton' - these were real places to visit, really alien and challenging. And then the people in 'White Mars' seem to be placed there in the ethnically acceptable mix just as they were in 'Star Trek' - a pretty old scenario in present times. I also wonder why so many utopian or alternative societies have to be built on deprived or degraded environments. Even imagined societies I admired immensely, such as Ursula LeGuin's anarchic society in 'The Dispossessed'. About the only way of avoiding the difficulties of evolving a society from where we are today, seems to be by setting it vastly in the future as in H G Wells's 'Time Machine' and W H Hudson's 'A Crystal Age.' To me, I would be much more impressed to have a new social order develop under my nose as I read about it, from the base of our current world and mix of societies. I am also displeased in that an 'alien' influence seems to be required to 'help' people develop their social skills. Humankind may not be the ideal society we would dream of, but we have achieved enormously and I have confidence that we can keep pushing forward, even through the dark times, into a new and better world and by our own initiative. In all, I was disappointed in this novel, partly because I have admired so much of Mr Aldiss's earlier work. White Mars, or How Flawed Beings Build Utopia, May 22, 2001 :

Reviewer

The discussion of how to build a better society is central to this book, and it is good. Cut off from Earth by an economic disaster, several thousand Mars colonists are thrown back on their own resources to sustain themselves. The focus is almost exclusively on the Mars of the mind-what kind of society can be formed/should be formed in the isolation of the Martian frontier? The characters endlessly discuss what it means to be human under these conditions. What institutions are necessary, and which ones can be avoided? How are we to raise children? How are we to conduct ourselves in a larger society? How are we to cope with our variegated behaviors when freedom brings us into conflict with one another? These questions and more are raised and raised again. I don't agree with many of the answers White Mars seems to provide, and so I was tempted to give the book three stars. For example, I don't agree that Mars should be set aside as a scientific preserve. However, I believe the most important thing is that the questions were asked and various opinions aired. White Mars is a valuable addition to the debate on Mars and on how human beings interact with our society. The science is really beside the point, which also tempted me to give White Mars three stars. The discussion on physics and the quest for meaning at the sub-particle level is half-developed and never really tied into the main story. There's also the discovery of native life on Mars, which is more science fantasy than science fiction. The more mundane science of maintaining a community of several thousand in total isolation on Mars is completely ignored, which is also a disappointment. As an answer to Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, White Mars falls so short in this department that I can't even say there was an effort at competition. At its heart, however, White Mars is a discussion on values and humanity. All other factors aside, this discussion makes the book worth reading and pondering. white mars, April 15, 2000 Reviewer

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In White Mars, the authors have written a nifty utopian tale for the technological age. Although the series of events on earth that leads to the eventual isolation of the martian colony struck me as highly improbable, I gave it little consideration as I was swept up in the real drama: The creation of a new and better society--a "mature culture" leaving behind the myths, preconceptions, and bigotries that plagues mid-twenty-first century earth. I liked to see them attack problems such as a lack of water, crime, a threatening over-population (curiously, artificial birth control is barely mentioned)with a kind of cooperative rationality. And,of course, the appearance of a singularly unique alien. Even though I'm particular when it comes to hard science fiction, I highly recommend this book.

St. Martin's Press

New York WHITE MARS. Copyright © 1999 by Brian W. Aldiss and Roger Penrose. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aldiss, Brian Wilson. White Mars, or, The mind set free : a 21st century Utopia / Brian W. Aldiss in collaboration with Roger Penrose.—1st U.S. ed. p. cm.

ISBN 0-312-25473-3 1. Twenty-first century—Fiction. 2. Mars (Planet)—Fiction. 3. Utopias—Fiction. I. Title: Mind set free. II. Penrose, Roger. III. Title.

PR6051.L3W47 2000 823'.914—dc21 99-462291 First published in Great Britain by Little, Brown and Company First U.S. Edition: April 2000 10 987654321

Dedicated to the Warden and Fellows Of Green College, Oxford

Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 Note Appendix by Dr. Laurence Lustgarten How It All Began

This people is 500 miles from Utopia eastward Sir Thomas More, Utopia We are getting to the end of visioning The impossible within this universe, Such as that better whiles may follow worse, And that our race may mend by reasoning Thomas Hardy, We Are Getting To The End

1 Memoir by Moreton Dennett, Secretary to Leo Anstruther, Concerning the Events of 23 June AD 2041

On this day, Leo Anstruther decided he would walk to the jetport because he believed in being unpredictable. I went with him, carrying his notecase. Two bodyguards walked behind us, following at a short distance. We wound our way down narrow back streets. Anstruther walked with his hands clasped behind his back, seemingly deep in thought. This was a part of his island he rarely visited; it held few charms for him. It was poverty alley. The narrow houses had been sub-divided in many cases, so that their occupants had overflowed into the streets to pursue their livelihoods. Vulcanisers, toy-makers, shoemakers, kite-sellers, junk-dealers, chandlers, fishermen and sellers of foodstuffs -all obstructed the freeway with their various businesses. I knew Anstruther had a concealed contempt for these unfortunates. These people, no matter how hard they worked, would never improve their lot. They had no vision. He often said it. Anstruther was the man of vision. He paused abruptly in a crowded square, looking about him at the shabby tenements on all sides. 'It's not just the poor who help the poor, as the absurd saying has it,' he said, addressing me although he looked elsewhere, 'but the poor who exploit the poor. They rent out their sordid rooms at extortionate rates to other families, inflicting misery on their own families for the sake of a few extra shekels.' I agreed. 'It's not a perfect world.' It was my job to agree. Among the dreary muddle of commerce, a bright stall stood out. An elderly man dressed in jeans and a khaki shirt stood behind a small table on which were stacked jars of preserved fruit, together with mangoes, blackcurrants, pineapples and cherries, as well as a handful of fresh vegetables. 'All home-grown and pure, senor. Buy and try!' cried the old man as Anstruther paused. Observing Anstruther's scepticism, he quoted a special low price per jar for his jams. 'We eat only factory food,' I told him. He ignored me and continued to address Anstruther. 'See my garden, master, how pure and sweet it is.' The old man gestured to the wrought-iron gate at his back. 'Here's where my produce comes from. From the earth itself, not from a factory.' Anstruther glanced at the phone-watch on his wrist. 'Garden!' he said with contempt. Then he laughed. 'Why not? Come on, Moreton.' He liked to be unpredictable. He gestured to the bodyguards to stay alert by the stall. On a sudden decision, he pushed through the gate and entered the old fellow's garden. He slammed the gate behind us. It would give the security men something to think about.

An elderly woman was sitting on an upturned tub, sorting peppers into a pot. A sweetsmelling jasmine on an overhead trellis shaded her from direct sunlight. She looked up in startlement, then gave Anstruther and me a pleasant smile. 'Buenos dias, masters. You've come to look about our little paradise, of that I'm certain. Don't be shy, now.' As she spoke, she rose, straightened her back and approached us. Beneath the wrinkles she had a pleasant round face, and though fragile with age stood alertly upright. She wiped her hands on an old beige apron tied about her waist and gave us something like a bow. 'Paradise, you say! It's a narrow paradise you have here, woman.' Anstruther was looking down its length, which was circumscribed by tile-topped walls. 'Narrow but long, and enough for the likes of Andy and me, master. We have what we require, and do not covet more.' Anstruther gave his short bark of laughter. 'Why not covet more, woman? You'd live better with more.' 'We should not live better by coveting more, merely more discontentedly, sir.' She proceeded to show her visitors the garden. The enclosing walls became concealed behind climbers and vines. Their way led with seeming randomness among flowering bushes and little shady arbours under blossom trees. The paths were narrow, so that they brushed by red and green peppers, a manioc patch and clumps of lavender and rosemary, which gave off pleasant scents as they were touched. Vegetables grew higgledy-piggledy with other plants. The hubbub of the streets was subdued by a murmur that came from bees blundering among flowers and the twitter of birds overhead. The woman's commentary was sporadic. 'I can't abide seeing bare earth. This bit of ground here I planted with comfrey as a child, and you see how it's flourished ever since. It's good for the purity of the blood.' Anstruther flicked away a bee that flew too near his face. 'All this must cost you something in fertiliser, woman.' She smiled up at him. 'No, no, senor. We're too poor for that kind of unwise outlay. Human water and human waste products are all the fertilising we require in our little property.' 'You're not on proper drainage? Are you on the Ambient?' 'What's that, the Ambient?' 'Universal electronic communication system. You've never heard of it? The American bio-electronic net?' 'We are too hard-up for such a thing, sir, you must understand. Nor do we require it for our kind of modest living. Would it add to our contentment? Not a jot. What the rest of the world does is no business of ours.' She searched his face for some kind of approval. He in his turn studied her old worn countenance, brown and wrinkled, from which brown eyes stared. 'You say you're content?' He spoke incredulously, as though the idea was new to him. She gave no answer, continuing to gaze at him with an expression between contempt and curiosity, as if Anstruther had arrived from another planet. Resenting her probing regard, he turned and commenced to walk back the way we had come.

'You aren't accustomed to gardens, I perceive, senor.' There was pride in her voice. 'Do you shut yourself in rooms, then? We don't ask for much. For us, ours is a little paradise, don't you see? The soil's so rich in worms, that's the secret. We're almost selfsufficient here, Andy and me. We don't ask for much.' He said, half joking, 'But you enjoy moralising. As we all do.' 'I only tell you the truth, sir, since you invited yourself in here.' 'I was curious to see how you people lived,' he told her. 'Today, I'm off to discuss the future of the planet Mars -which you've probably never heard of.' She had heard of Mars. She considered it uninteresting, since there was no life there. 'No worms, eh, my good woman? Couldn't you do something better with your life than growing vegetables in your own excreta?' She followed us up the winding path, brushing away a tendril of honeysuckle from her face, amused and explaining, 'It's healthy, my good sir, you see. They call it recycling. I've lived in this garden nigh on seventy years and I want nothing else. This little plot was my mother's idea. She said, "Cultivate your garden. Don't disturb the work of the worms. Be content with your lot." And that's what Andy and I have done. We don't wish for Mars. The vegetables and fruits we sell keep us going well enough. We're vegetarian, you see. You two gentlemen aren't from the council, are you?' Something in the tone of her voice stung Anstruther. 'No. Certainly not. So you've simply done what your mother told you all the years of your life! Did you never have any ideas of your own? What does your husband make of you being stuck here for seventy years, just grubbing in the soil?' 'Andy is my brother, master, if you refer to him. And we've been perfectly happy and harmed no one. Nor been impolite to anyone...' We had regained the tiny paved area by the gate. We could smell the fragrance of the thyme, growing in the cracks between the paving stones, crushed underfoot. The two looked at each other in mutual distrust. Anstruther was a tall, solidly built man, who dominated the fragile little woman before him. He saw she was angry. I feared he might destroy all her contentment with an expression of his irritation at her narrow-mindedness. He held the words back. 'Well, it's a pretty garden you have,' he said. 'Very pretty. I'm glad to have seen it.' She was pleased by the compliment. 'Perhaps there might be gardens like this on Mars one day,' she suggested, with a certain slyness. 'Not very likely.' 'Perhaps you would like some beans to take away with you?' 'I carry no money.' 'No, no, I mean as a gift. They might improve your temperament after all that factory food you eat.' 'Don't be disgusting. Eat your beans yourself.' He turned and gestured to me to open the gate. His two security men were waiting for him outside. Anstruther's jet took us to the UN building. Members of the United Nationalities rarely met in person. They conferred over the Ambient, and only on special occasions were they bodily present; this was such an occasion, when the future of the planet Mars was to be decided. For this reason, the United Nationalities building was small, and not particularly

imposing, although in fact it was larger than it needed to be, to satisfy the egos of its members. On my Ambient I called Legalassist on the third level and gained entry to their department while Anstruther fraternised with other delegates below. A Euripides screened me various files on EUPACUS, the international consortium whose component nations - the European Union, the Pacific Rim nations, and the United States - all had a claim on Mars. Flicking to a file on the legal history of Antarctica, I saw that a similar situation had once existed there. Twelve nations had all laid claim to a slice of the White Continent. In December 1959 representatives of these nations had drawn up an Antarctic Treaty, which came into effect in June 1961. The treaty represented a remarkable step forward for reason and international cooperation. Territorial disputes were suspended, all military activities banned, and the Antarctic became a Continent for Science. I took print-outs of relevant details. They might prove useful in the forthcoming debate. What the twentieth century had managed, we could certainly better, and on a grander scale, in our century. In the ground-floor reception rooms, I found my boss consorting with Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Malay diplomats, all members of interested Pacrim countries. Anstruther was improving his shining image. A great amount of smiling by activating the zygomatic muscle went on, as is customary during such encounters. When the session gong sounded, I accompanied Anstruther into the Great Hall, where we took our assigned places. Once I was seated at a desk in the row behind him, I passed him the Legalassist prints. Unpredictable as ever, he barely glanced at them. Today's the time for oratory, not facts,' he said. His voice was remote. He was psyching himself up for the debate. When all delegates were assembled and quiet prevailed in the hall, the General Secretary made his announcement: 'This is the General Assembly of the United Nationalities, meeting on 23 June 2041, to determine the future status of Planet Mars.' The first speaker was called. Svetlana Yulichieva of Russia was eloquent. She said that the manned landing on Mars marked a new page, if not a new volume, in the history of mankind. All nationalities rejoiced in the success of the Mars mission, despite the tragic loss of their captain. The way of the future was now clear. More landings must be financed, and preparations be made to terraform Mars, so that it could be properly colonised and used as a base for further exploration of the outer solar system. She suggested that Mars come under UN jurisdiction. The Latvian delegate was eloquent. He agreed with Yulichieva's sentiments and said that the space-going nations must be congratulated on the enterprise they had shown. The loss of Captain Tracy was regretted, but must not be allowed to impede further progress. Was not, he asked rhetorically, the opening-up of a new world part of a human dream, the dream of going forth to conquer space, as envisioned in many fictions, book and film, in which mankind went forward boldly, overcoming everything hostile which stood in its way, occupying planet after planet? The beginning of the eventual encompassing of the galaxy had begun. The terraforming of Mars must assume top priority. The Argentinian delegate, Maria Porua, begged to disagree. She spoke at length of the hideous costs of an enterprise such as terraforming, the success of which was not

guaranteed. Recent disappointments, such as the failure of the hypercollider on the Moon - the brainchild of a Nobel Prize winner - must act as a caution. There were terrestrial problems enough, on which the enormous investments required for any extraterrestrial adventure could more profitably be spent. Tobias Bengtson, the delegate for Sweden, scorned the last speaker's response to a magnificent leap into an expanding future. He reminded the assembly of the words of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the great Russian aeronautical engineer, who had said that Earth was the cradle of mankind, but that mankind could not remain for ever in the cradle. 'This great nineteenth-century visionary woke up the human race to its destiny in space. The dream has grown more real, more accurate, more pressing, as the years have progressed. A glorious prospect must not be allowed to slip away. A few deaths, a little expense, along the way must not deflect the nationalities from achieving our destiny, the conquest of all solar space, from the planet Mercury right out to the heliopause. Only then will the dreams of our forefathers - and our mothers - be fulfilled.' Other speakers rose, many arguing that terraforming was a necessity. Why go to Mars if not to create more living space? Some warned that Mars would become a United States dependency, others that a ruling was required, otherwise competing nations would use Mars not as living space, but as a battlefield. 'I am going to talk practicalities,' said a delegate from the Netherlands. 'I have listened to a lot of airy-fairy talk here today. The reality is that we have now acquired this entire little planet of waste land. What are we to do with it? It's no good for anything.' He thumped the desk for emphasis. 'Who'd want to live there? You can't grow anything on it. But we can dump our dangerous nuclear waste on Mars. It would be safe there. You can build a mountain of waste by one of the poles - it might even make the place look a bit more interesting.' It was Leo Anstruther's turn to speak. The antagonism generated against the previous delegate's speech gave him the opportunity to put his argument forward. He walked deliberately to the rostrum, where he scrutinised the assembly before speaking. 'Do you have to act out the dreams of your mothers and fathers?' he asked. 'If we had always done so, would we not still be sitting in a jungle in the middle of Africa, going in fear of the tribe in the next tree? EUPACUS - and not simply NASA - has achieved a great feat of organisation and engineering, for which we sincerely congratulate them. But this arrival of a crew of men and women on the Red Planet must have nothing to do with conquest. Nor should we turn the place into a rubbish dump. Have we lost our reverence for the universe about us?' My boss went on to say that he had nothing but contempt for people who merely sat at home. But going forward did not mean merely proliferation; proliferation was already bringing ruin to Earth. Everyone had to be clear that to repeat our errors on other planets was not progress. It more closely resembled rabbits overrunning a valuable field of wheat. Now was our chance to prove that we had progressed in Realms of Reason, as well as in Terms of Technology. What, after all, he asked, were these dreams of conquest that mankind was supposed to approve? Were they not violent and xenophobic? We had not to permit ourselves to live a fiction about other fictions. To attempt to fulfil them was to take a downward path at the very moment an upward path opened before us, to crown our century.

The old ethos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had been crude and bloody, and had brought about untold misery. It had to be abandoned, and here was a God-given chance to abandon it. He disapproved of that too readily used metaphor that said 'a new page in history had been turned'. Now was the time to throw away that old history book, and to begin anew as a putative interplanetary race. Delegates had to consider dispassionately whether to embark on a new mode of existence, or to repeat the often bloody mistakes of yesterday. 'All environments are sacrosanct,' Anstruther declared. 'The planet Mars is a sacrosanct environment and must be treated as such. It has not existed untouched for millions of years only to be reduced to one of Earth's tawdry suburbs today. My strong recommendation is that Mars be preserved, as the Antarctic has been preserved for many years, as a place of wonder and meditation, a symbol of our future guardianship of the entire solar system - a planet for science, a White Mars.' The General Secretary declared a break for lunch. The German delegate, Thomas Gunther, came up to Anstruther, glass in hand. He nodded cordially to us both. 'You have a fine style of rhetoric, Leo,' he said. 'I am on your side against the mad terraformers, although I don't quite manage to think of Mars as in any way sacred, as you imply. After all, it is just a dead world - not a single old temple there. Not even an old grave, or a few bones.' 'No worms either, Thomas, I'm led to believe.' 'According to latest reports, there's no life on it of any kind, and maybe never has been. "Martians" are just one of those myths we have lumbered ourselves with. We need no more silly nonsense of that kind.' He smiled teasingly at Anstruther, as if challenging him to disagree. When Anstruther made no answer, Gunther developed his line of argument. The safe arrival of men on the Red Planet could be traced back to the German astronomer, Johannes Kepler, who - in the midst of the madness of the Thirty Years War - formulated the laws of planetary motion. Kepler was one of those men who, rather like Anstruther, defied the assumptions of others. To declare for the first time that the orbit of a planet was an ellipse, with the sun situated at one focus, was a brave statement with far-reaching consequences. Similarly, what was decided on this day, in the hall of the UN, would have far-reaching consequences, for good or ill. Brave statements were required once more. Gunther said his strong prompting was not to vex the delegates with talk of the sanctity of Mars. Since much - everything, indeed - was owed to science, then the planet must be kept for science. Sow in the minds of delegates the doubt whether the long elaborate processes of terraforming could succeed. Terraforming so far existed only in laboratory experiments. It was originally an idea cooked up by a science fiction writer. It would be foolhardy to try it out on a whole planet - particularly the one planet easily accessible to mankind. 'You could quote,' Gunther said, 'the words of a Frenchman, Henri de Chatelier, who in 1888 spoke of the principle of opposition in any natural system to further change. Mars itself would resist terraforming if any organisation was rash enough to try it.' He advised Anstruther to stick with the slogan 'White Mars'. The simple common mind, which he deplored as much as Anstruther, would wish something to be done with Mars. Very well. Then what should be done was to dedicate the planet to science and

allow only scientists on its surface - its admittedly unprepossessing surface. People should not be allowed to do their worst there, building their hideous office blocks and car parks and fast-food stalls. They must be stopped, as they had been prevented from invading the Antarctic. He and Anstruther must fight together to preserve Mars for science. He believed there was a delegate from California who thought as they did. After all, he concluded, there were experiments that could be conducted only on that world. 'What experiments do you mean?' Anstruther enquired. At this, Gunther hesitated. 'You will think me self-interested when I speak. That is not the case. I seize on my example because it comes readily to mind. Perhaps we might go out on a balcony, since there are those near us anxious to overhear what we say. Take a samosa with you. I assure you they are delicious.' 'My secretary always accompanies me, Thomas.' 'As you like.' He threw me a suspicious glance. The two men went out on the nearest balcony, and I followed them. The balcony overlooked beautiful Lake Louise, the pellucid waters of which seemed to lend colour to the sky. 'No doubt you know what I mean by "the Omega Smudge"?' Gunther said. 'It's the elusive final ghost of a particle. When it's known - all's known! As I presume you are aware, I am the president of a bank that, together with the Korean Investment Corporation, financed a search for the Gamma Smudge on Luna, following the postulate of the Chin Lim Chung-Dreiser Hawkwood formulation.' He bit into his samosa and talked round a mouthful. 'It was thought that the lunar vacuum would provide ideal conditions for research. Unfortunately, the fools were already busy up there, erecting their hotels and supermarkets and buggy parks and drilling for this and that. As you know, they have now almost finished construction on a subway designed to carry busybodies back and forth to their nasty little offices and eateries. 'At great expense, we built our ring - our superconducting search ring. Useless!' 'You did not find your smudge, I hear.' 'It is not to be found on the Moon. The drilling and the subway vibration have driven it off. Certainly experts argue about whether that was so - but experts will argue about anything. It has still to be discovered.' Gunther went on to explain that the high-energy detection of the Beta Smudge nearly two decades ago had merely disclosed a further something, a mess of resonances - another smudge. Gunther's bank was prepared to fund a different sort of research, to pin down a hidden symmetry monopole. 'And if you find it?' Anstruther asked, not concealing his scepticism. 'Then the world is changed ... And I'll have changed it!' Gunther puffed out his chest and clenched his hands. 'Leo, the Americans and the Russians have tried to find this particle, and others, without success. It has an almost mystical importance. This elusive little gizmo so far remains little more than an hypothesis, but it is believed to be responsible for assigning mass to all other kinds of particle in the universe. Can you imagine its importance?' 'We're talking about a destroyer of worlds?'

Gunther gestured dismissively. 'In the wrong hands, yes, I suppose so. But in the right hands this elusive smudge will provide ultimate power, power to travel right across the galaxy at speeds exceeding the speed of light.' Anstruther snorted to show he regarded such talk as ridiculous. 'Well, that's all hypothetical and I'm no expert,' said Gunther, defensively, and went on, laying emphasis on his words. 'I am not yet ruined and I wish for this quest to be continued. It can be continued only on Mars. I know I can raise the money. We can find the Omega Smudge there, and transcend Einstein's equations - if we fight today to keep Mars free of the terraformers.' Anstruther gave me a glance, as if to show that he was aware of Gunther's bluster. All he asked, coolly, was, 'What in practical terms do you have against terraforming?' 'Our search needs silence - absence of vibration. Mars is the only silent place left in the habitable universe, my friend!' When the bell rang for the afternoon session, the delegates trooped back to their places in a more sober mood than previously. The delegate for Nicaragua gave voice to a general uncertainty. 'We are required to pronounce judgement on the future of Mars. But can "judgement" possibly be a proper description for what will conclude our discussions? Are we not just seeking to relieve ourselves of a situation of moral complexity? How can we judge wisely on what is almost entirely an unknown? Let us therefore decide that Mars is sacrosanct, if only for a while. I suggest that it comes under UN jurisdiction, and that the UN forbids any reckless developments on that planet - at least until we have made doubly sure that no life exists there.' Thomas Gunther rose to support this plea. 'Mars must come under UN jurisdiction, as the delegate from Nicaragua says. Any other decision would be a disgrace. The story of colonisation must not be repeated, with its dismal chapters of land devastation and exploitation of workers. Anyone who ventures to Mars must be assured that his rights are guaranteed right here. By maintaining the Red Planet for science, we shall give the world notice that the days of land-grabbing are finally over. 'We want a White Mars. 'This is not an economic decision but a moral one. Some delegates will remember the bitter arguments that raged when we were deciding to move the international dateline from the Pacific to the middle of the Atlantic. That was a development dictated purely by financial interests, for mere convenience of trade between the Republic of California and their partners of the Pacrim. We must now make a more serious decision, in which financial interest plays no part. 'If we are to explore the entire solar system and beyond, then this first step along the way must be marked by favourable omens and wise decisions. We must proceed with due humility and caution, forgetting the damaging fantasies of yesterday. 'I beg you to set aside a whole folklore of interplanetary conquest and to vote for the preservation of Mars - White Mars, as Mr. Leo Anstruther has called it. By so doing, we shall speak for knowledge, for wisdom, as opposed to avarice.' Gunther nodded in a friendly way to Anstruther as he strode from the podium. Other speakers went to the podium to have their say, but now, increasingly, the emphasis was on how and why the Red Planet should be governed.

The sun was setting over the great milky lake beyond the conference hall when the final vote was taken. The General Secretary announced that the UN Department for the Preservation of Mars would be set up, and the White Mars Treaty executed. Taking Thomas Gunther aside, the Secretary asked casually if Anstruther should be appointed head of the department. 'I would strongly advise against it,' Gunther said. 'The man is too unpredictable.'

2 The Testimony of Acting Captain Buzz McGregor, 23 May AD 2041 My eyes had not been trained to see such a panorama. I was disoriented, like my entire physical body depended on my sight. Closing my eyes, I became aware of another source of strangeness. I was standing on solid ground, but I had lost pounds in weight. Bracing myself, I tried to take account of our surroundings. Beyond the suited figures of my friends lay a world of solitude, infinite and tumbled, with nothing on which the gaze could rest. My mind, checking for something familiar, ran through a number of fantasy landscapes, from Dis to Barsoom, without relief. Grim? Oh yes, it was grim - but marvellously complex, built like a diabolical artist's construct. I was looking at something wonderfully unknown, indigestible, hitherto inaccessible. And I was among the first to take it all in! And suddenly I found myself flushing. Like a blow to the heart came the thought: But I am of a species more extraordinary than anything else there ever was. One day all this desolation would be turned into a fertile world much like Earth. We broke from our trance. Our first task was to unload the body of Captain Tracy from our vehicle and place it in its body bag on the Martian surface. Although he was in his late thirties, Guy Tracy had seemed to be the fittest among us, but the acceleration and later deceleration had brought on the heart attack that killed him before we landed. This death in Mars's orbit had seemed like a bad omen for the mission, but, as we laid his body down among the rocks of the regolith, a glassy effect flared into the sky as if in welcome. Low, almost beyond the visible, it was, we figured later, an aurora. Charged particles from the sun were interacting with molecules of the thin atmosphere trapped in Mars's slight magnetic field. The ghostly phenomenon seemed to flutter almost at shoulder level. It faded and was gone as we stepped back from the body bag. For a planet receiving sunlight equivalent to only some 40 per cent of Earth's generous ration, the little illumination show was encouraging. Calls from base broke into our solemn thoughts. We were reluctant to talk back to Earth. They challenged us to say what had gone wrong. 'You have to be here to understand. You have to have made the journey. You have to experience Mars in its majesty to know that to try to alter - to terraform - this ancient place would be wrong. A terrible mistake. Not just for Mars. For us. For all mankind.' There was a long pained argument. It takes forty minutes for a signal to traverse the distance between Earth and Mars and back - and between experiences. Night came on, sweeping over the plain. The stars glittered overhead. We waited. We tried to explain. Base ordered us to continue with our duties.

We said - everything was recorded - 'It is our duty to tell you that humanity's arrival on another planet marks a turning point in our history. We should not alter this planet. We must try to alter ourselves.' Forty minutes passed. We waited uneasily. 'What do you mean by this talk? Why are you going moral on us?' After some discussion, we replied, 'There has to be a better way forward.' After forty minutes, a different voice from base. 'What in hell are you going on about up there? Have you all gone crazy?' 'We said you wouldn't understand.' And we closed the link and went to our bunks. Not a sound disturbed our sleep. Our salaries, like our training, came from the EUPACUS combine. I knew and trusted their engineering skills. Of their intentions I was less sure. To win the Mars tender, the consortium had agreed merely to run all travel arrangements for ten years and to organise expeditions. I was well aware that they intended to begin the long process of terraforming by the back door, so to speak. Their hidden intentions were to turn Mars into saleable real estate; profitability depended on it. So I was told. EUPACUS was contracted to run all ground operations on Mars, and could prevent unwanted curiosity there. Their investors would be eager to get their money back with interest, without being too concerned with how it was done. I woke with a firm determination to defy the stockholders. Like everyone else, our crew had seen and been seduced by computer-generated pictures of EUPACUS-format Mars. Domes and greenhouses were laid out in neat array. Factories were set up for the task of extracting oxygen from the Martian rock. Nuclear suns blazed in the blue sky. In no time, bronzed men in T-shirts stepped forth among green fields, or climbed into bubble cars and drove furiously among Martian mountains already turning green. Standing amid that magnificent desolation, the salesman's dream fizzled out like a punctured balloon. We had landed almost on the equator, in the south-western corner of Amazonis Planitia, to the west of the high Tharsis Shield. Our parent ship acted as communication relay satellite, so that we could travel and keep in touch with one another. Highly necessary on a world where the horizon - supposing the terrain to be flat, which it mostly was not - was only 25 miles away. In its areosynchronous orbit, travelling 17,065 kilometres above ground, the ship appeared stationary to us, a reassuring sight when so much was strange. But before we began our surveying we had to erect our geodesic dome to support a one-millimetre-thick dome fabric. We had been weakened by the months of flight, despite on board exercise. This weakness turned the building of the dome into a major task, impeded as we were by our spacesuits. Night was upon us before we were half finished. We had to retreat back into the module, to wait for morning. When morning came, out we went again, determined not to let the structure beat us. We needed the dome. It would afford protection against the deepest cold and dust storms. We could exercise here and offload into it some of the machinery that made life in the module maddeningly cramped. Of course, as yet we had no means of filling it with breathable air at a tolerable pressure, even after we made it airtight. Since the dome had

to go up, up it eventually went. When the last girders were bolted together and the last tie of the plastic lining secured -why, we needed no more exercise ... Our brief was to explore a few kilometres of the planet. Its enormous land area was as great in extent as Earth's, if not quite as various. It had plains, escarpments, riverbeds, vast canyons greater than anything terrestrial and extinct volcanoes - none of them traversed by human beings. We activated the TV cameras, and climbed aboard the two methane-powered buggies, to head eastward. The intensity of that experience will always remain with me. While folks back home might see nothing on their screens but a kind of broken desert, that journey for us carried a strong emotional charge. It was as if we had travelled back in time, to a period before life had begun in the universe. Everything lay waiting, still, latent, piercing. None of us spoke. We were experiencing a different version of reality - a reality somehow menacing but calming. It was like being under the thunderous eye of God. As we climbed, the regolith became less rocky. We might have been traversing the palm of an old man's withered hand. On either side were dried gulleys, forming intricate veins, and small impact craters, evidence of the bombardment of this world from space. We stopped periodically, taking up samples of rock and soil and storing them in an outer compartment for examination later, always marking the micro-environment from which they came. Since the ground temperature was sixty degrees below, we had little expectation of finding even a micro-organism. Our progress became slower as the slope became steeper. We were now within sight of the flanks of the massive Tharsis Shield. August, lugubrious, it dominated the way ahead. It would be the subject of a later and better equipped exploration. Once we had caught sight of the graceful dome of Olympus Mons - a volcano long extinct - we turned the vehicles about and went back to base. For the first kilometre of the return journey, the dust we had disturbed still hung in the thin atmosphere. The laboratory was in my charge. By sundown, I had begun to test the first rock samples. The gas chromatograph mass spectrometer gave no indication of life. Part disappointed, part relieved, I went to join the others in the canteen for supper. We were a strangely silent group. We knew something memorable had happened in the history of mankind and wanted to digest the meaning of the occasion. Drilling equipment had been set up in the dome before our excursion. A computer beeping summoned us to judge results. Water had been discovered 1.2 kilometres below ground level. Upon analysis, it was found to be relatively pure and inert. No traces of microorganisms. We rejoiced. With a water supply, living on Mars was now practicable. But the way lay open for terraforming.

Cang Hai's Account

3 The EUPACUS Deal: The Rotten Door Should the citizens of the United States, for example, be answerable solely to Martian law when on Mars? Eventual answer: Yes. Mars is not a colony, but an independent world. This was the sensible legal decision that became the foundation stone for the Deed of Independence that governs our lives on Mars and will stand as exemplar for all the other worlds we inhabit in times to come. One of the greatest achievements of the last century was the establishing of preliminary planetary surveys. Less acknowledged was a system of workable international law. From the start, weapons were prohibited here. Smoking is necessarily prohibited, not only as a pollutant but as a needless consumer of oxygen. Only low-grade alcohols are allowed. Habit-forming drugs are unknown. An independent judicial system was soon established. Certain categories of science are encouraged. We owe everything to science. Under these laws and the laws of nature, we have built our community. When I think back to this early time just now, I find consolation there. My daughter, Alpha Jefferies - now Alpha Jefferies Greenway - left Mars last year to live on a planet she had never known. I fear for her on that alien globe, although she now has a contracthusband to protect her. She told me once, when we were still in communication, that Earth is the world of life. My image of it is as a world of death - of starvation, genocides, murders, and many horrors from which our world here does not suffer. My arguments with my dear lost daughter have caused me to look again at those first years on Mars, when there was an excitement about being on a strange world and we were not entirely free of Earth-generated myths regarding ancient life on Mars, of finding old land-locked canals leading nowhere, or great lost palaces in the deserts, or the tombs of the last Lords of Syrtis! Well, that's all juvenile romanticism, part of the fecundity of human imagination, which sought to populate an empty world. And that is what still thrills me - this great empty world in which we live! I will introduce myself. I am the adopted daughter of the great Tom Jefferies. I first knew life in the crowded city of Chengdu in China, where I was trained as a teacher of handicapped children. After five years of teaching in the Number Three Disability School, I felt a longing to try another planet. I applied for work on a UN work scheme and was accepted.

For my community service, I served for a year as kennel-maid at a dog-breeding station in Manchuria, where life was extremely hard. I passed the behavioural tests to become a fully fledged YEA. After all the preliminaries, including the two-week MIC or Martian Inculcation Course - I was permitted to board the EUPACUS ship to Mars, together with two friends, on an ORT, an Opposition Return Trip. What excitement! What dread! Although I had anticipated that Mars itself would be bleak, I had not imagined life in the domes, which, by the time I arrived, was unexpectedly colourful. As a reminder of the semi-Oriental composition of Marvelos, the travel bureau subsidiary of EUPACUS which freighted everyone to Mars and back, brilliant lanterns were hung among the simple apartment blocks. Tank-walls of living fish stood everywhere. Flowering trees (originating from Prunus autumnalis subhirtella) were planted along avenues. And what I liked best were the genetically adapted macaws and parrots that cast a scatter of colour as they flew free, and sang with sweet voices instead of croaking. Apart from this pleasant sound, the domes were reasonably quiet, since the small jojo ('jump-on-jump-off') electric buses taking people about made little noise. As I grew to know the settlement better, I found this colourful sector was just the 'tourist spot'. Beyond it lay the rather grimmer Permanents Sector, austere and undecorated, lying behind P. Lowell Street. All this was enclosed, of course, under domes and spicules. Outside lay an airless planet of rumpled rock. My spine tingled just to look out at it. Not that this view was featureless. To the west lay the rumpled extent of Amazonis Planitia, on the eastern edge of which we were situated. The domes had been built squarely on the 155th latitude, 18 degrees north of the equator. The site was sheltered from ferocious winds, which had built the yardangs to westward. Our shelter loomed to the east of us, to the immense bulk of Olympus Mons, the clifflike edges of whose skirts were only some 295 kilometres away. Its seamed slopes were lit every evening by the dull sun. The Pavonis Observatory began immediately to give brilliant results. Studies of the gas giants became transformed almost into a new branch of astrophysics. Research into earlier temporalities and proto-temporalities was enlarging an understanding of the birth of the universe. Probes launched from the Martian surface had brought back iron-hard samples of ammonia-methane mix from Pluto containing impurities suggesting that the distant planet had its origins beyond the solar system. A meteorite watch station became operative. Thomas Gunther's Omega Smudge detector was being established when I made my first trip outside. The tube was under construction. I heard it said that clever lawyers were bending the proscriptions on doing science under Martian law in order to permit a larger ring to be built if needed. However that was, the research unit, established half a kilometre from the domes (Areopolis as it now is), came under the control of the authoritarian particle physicist, Dreiser Hawkwood. Because of its later significance, I must report a conversation that took place some time in those early days. It was recorded, as were most discussions in the first years, and

now resides in the Martian Archive. Maybe similar conversations took place elsewhere. They assumed importance in the light of later discoveries. Four scientists in the Pavonis Observatory, perched high on the Tharsis Shield, were talking. The deepest voice was identifiable as that of Dreiser Hawkwood himself. He was a bulky man with an unfashionable moustache and a gloomy expression. 'When we were driving up here,' a woman said, 'I kept thinking I saw white objects like tongues slicking away underground, fast as an oyster goes down a gullet. Tell me I was dreaming.' 'We've established there is no life on Mars. So you were dreaming,' said a colleague. 'Then I was dreaming too,' said another. 'I also saw those white things sticking up, disappearing as we approached. It seemed so unlikely I didn't care to say anything.' 'Could they be worms?' 'What, without topsoil?' Dreiser Hawkwood asked. His deep voice is easily identifiable. He laughed, and his colleagues laughed obediently with him. 'We shall find a natural geological explanation for them in time. They may be a form of stalagmite.' The fourth member of the group did not contribute to this conversation. He was sitting somewhat distant from his friends, staring out of the canteen window at Olympus Mons, only a few kilometres away. 'Must get together an expedition to look at that weird volcano,' he said. 'The largest feature on the planet and we make little of it.' Olympus Mons was about 550 kilometres across. It rose to 25 kilometres above the Mars datum, in consequence of which it could be seen from Earth even in the days of terrestrial telescopes. It rated as one of the most remarkable objects in the solar system. Despite the interest of the scientists, increased demand for oxygen and water severely limited exploration work. Fuel for vehicular exploration consumed more oxygen. It was to be some while before Olympus Mons was investigated - or really entered our consciousness to any extent. I'm not accustomed to being an historian. Why have I set myself this task? Because I was there on that occasion when Tom Jefferies stood up and declared, 'I'm going to kick down a rotten door. I'm going to let light in on human society. I'm going to make us live what we dream of being - great and wise people, cicumspect, daring, inventive, loving, just. People we deserve to be. All we have to dare to do is throw away the old and difficult and embrace what's new and difficult and wonderful!' I'm getting ahead of myself, so I'd better describe how it was in the early days on the Red Planet. I want to set down all the difficulties and limitations we, the first people on an alien planet, experienced - and all our hopes. EUPACUS got us there, EUPACUS set up all the dimensions of travel. Whatever went wrong later, you have to admit they never lost a ship, or a life, in transit on the YEA and DOP shippings. You certainly stayed close to nature on Mars, or the Eternal Verities, as a friend of mine called them. Oxygen and water supplies were fairly constant preoccupations. Water was rationed to 3.5 kilograms per person per day. Communal laundering drank up another 3 kilograms per head per day. Everyone enjoyed a fair share of the supply; in consequence there were few serious complaints. Spartan though this rationing may

sound, it compared quite favourably with the water situation on Earth. There, with its slowly rising population, industrial demands on fresh water had increased to the point where all water everywhere was metered and as expensive as engine fuels of medium grade. This effectively limited the economically stressed half of the terrestrial population to something less than the Martian allocation. The need to conserve everything led to our system of communal meals. We all sat down together at table in two shifts, and were leisurely about our frugal meals, eking out food with conversation. Sometimes one of the company would read to us during the evening meal - but that came later. At first I was shy about sitting among all those strange faces, amid the hubbub. Some of the people there I would later get to be friends with (not Mary Fangold, though), such as Hal Kissorian, Youssef Choihosla, Belle Rivers, funny Crispin Barcunda - oh, and many others. But by luck I chanced to sit next to a pretty bright-faced YEA person. Her shock of curly dark brown locks was quite unlike my own straight black hair. She overcame my shyness, and obviously treated the whole business of being on a strange planet as a wonderful adventure. Her name was Kathi Skadmorr. 'I've been so lucky,' she told me. 'I just came from a poor family in Hobart, the capital city of Tasmania. I was one of five children.' This shocked me. It was not permitted to have five children where I came from. She said, 'I served my year at Darwin, working for IWR, International Water Resources. I learned much about the strange properties of water, how the solid state is lighter than the liquid state, how with capillary action it seems to defy gravity, how it conducts light...' She broke off and laughed. 'It's boring for you to hear all this.' 'No, not at all. I'm just amazed you wanted to talk to me.' She looked at me long and carefully. 'We all have important roles to play here. The world has narrowed down. I'm sure your role will be important. You must make it so. I intend to make mine so.' 'But you're so pretty.' 'I'm not going to let that stop me.' And she gave a captivating chuckle. As almost everyone of that first Martian population agreed, to survive on Mars close cooperation was a necessity. The individual ego had to submit to the needs of the whole body of people. Continual television reports from Mars brought to the attention of the Downstairs world (as we came to call Earth) the fairness of Martian governance and our egalitarian society. It contrasted markedly with terrestrial injustice and inequality. I don't want to talk about my own troubles, but I had been rather upset by the voyage from Earth, so much so that I had been referred to a psychurgist, a woman called Helen Panorios. Helen had a dim little cabin on one of the outer spicules where she saw patients. She was a heavily built lady with dyed purple hair. I never saw her wearing anything other than an enfolding black overall-suit. A mild woman she was, who did seem genuinely interested in my problems.

As I explained to her, the six-month journey in cryosleep had terrified me. I had been detached from my life and seemed unable to reconnect with my ego. It was something to do with my personality. 'Some people hate the experience; some enjoy it as a kind of spiritual adventure. It can be seen as a sort of death, but it is a death from which you reawaken - sometimes with a new insight into yourself.' That's what she kept telling me. Basically she was saying that most people accepted cryosleep as a new experience. Just coming to Mars, being on Mars, was a new experience. I had come to hate the very name EUPACUS. The thought of undergoing that same annihilation getting home again to Earth scared me rigid. There had to be a better way of making that journey across millions of miles of space - or matrix as the new more correct term had it. Interstellar matrix teemed with radiations and particles, so that to naked experience 'space' had come to have a Victorian ring about it. Travel between Earth and Mars was on the increase, or at least it had been before the disaster. Marvelos was hard pressed to meet the demand. Space vehicles were manufactured in terrestrial orbit under licence. Practically every industrialised nation of Earth was involved in their manufacture, if only in making pillows for the coffin-cots. The space vehicles, each with elaborate back-up facilities, were billion-dollar items. Shareholders were reluctant to invest in more rapid development. Takeovers and mergers of companies were happening all the time under the EUPACUS roof. Helen talked me through the entire process of a voyage. The consortium's ferry ships carried us passengers up from Earth to the interplanetaries, which parked in orbit about Earth and Luna. I was queasy from the start, even with a g-snort in me. I'm really not a good traveller. Then we passed into the interplanetary passenger ships, popularly known as 'fridge wagons'. You never forget the curious smell in a fridge wagon. I believe they start right away with some sort of airborne anaesthetic circulating. 'I didn't care for the way the compartments were so like refrigerated coffins,' I told Helen. Even before the wagon released from orbit, you were going rapidly into that dark nowhere of cryosleep as bodily functions slowed. That was terror for me ... 'You were primed beforehand, Cang Hai, dear,' said Helen. 'You know well the economics of that journey back at that stage of development. Taking passengers in cryosleep obviates the need for the ships to carry food and water. Little air is needed. Fuel and expense are saved. Otherwise, well, no trip...' I relived the rush upwards from Earth. For most people, the spirit of adventure overcame any feelings of sickness, though not for me. Two hundred and fifty-six kilometres up, the barrel shape of the fridge wagon loomed, riding in its orbit. It had looked small, then it was enormous. Its registration number was painted large on its hull. You have to admit it was a neat manoeuvre, considering the speed at which both bodies were travelling. With hardly a jar, they locked. I did then dare, before entering the wagon, to take a last look out at the Earth we were leaving. Fridge waggons have no ports. I had to cry a little. Helen tenderly placed a hand on my shoulder, like the mother I never had, saying nothing. I was leaving behind my Other, back in Chengdu. Nobody would understand that.

Once in that strange-smelling interior, dense with low murmurs of various machines, we were guided to a small apartment, a locker room really. There one undressed with a neuter android in attendance, stowed away one's few belongings, and took a radiation shower. It was like preparing for a gas chamber. Advised by the android, you now had to lock your bare feet into wall-grooves and clasp the rungs in the curving wall above head level. The compartment now swung and travelled to a vacant coffin-cell. Music played. The aria 'Above my feet the roses speak...' from Delaport's opera Supertoys. Then you were somehow motionless and monitors uncoiled like snakes. Tiny feeds attached themselves to your body. Before the wagon left orbit, your body temperature was approaching that of frozen meat. You might as well have been dead. You were dead. I did a bit of screaming in front of Helen Panorios. Gradually I seemed to get better. We worked through the disorientation of rousing back to life in Mars orbit, speeding above all that varied tumble of rock and desert and old broken land. 'You certainly have to welcome new experience to get that far!' I said at one point. When disaster struck, those who welcomed new experience were certainly well prepared for anything. Which was an important factor in influencing what happened to us all. Helen rather liked to lecture me. She called it 'establishing a context'. Marvelos organised two types of visit to Mars, one when Earth and Mars were in conjunction, (called the CRT, the Conjunction Return Trip), one when they were in opposition (called the ORT, the Opposition Return trip). Outward bound both trips took half a year. It was inevitable that those trips had to be passed in cryosleep. Perhaps it's worth reminding people that by 'year' I always mean Earth year. Earth imposed its year on Mars thinking much as the Christian calendar had been imposed over most of Earth's nations, whether Christian or not. We will come to the rest of the Martian calendar and our clocks later. The difficulty lay in the provision of return journeys. Helen grew quite excited about this. She showed me slides. While the return leg of an ORT took an uncomfortable year, the CRT took only half a year, no longer than the trip outwards. The snag was that the ORT required a stay of only thirty days on Mars, which was generally regarded as a pretty ideal time period, whereas the CRT entailed a stay of over a year and a half. I was booked for an ORT, and found I couldn't face the mere thought of it. Helen had booked on a CRT. Her time away from Earth was going to be eighteen times longer than mine. Although I remained in touch with my Other in Chengdu, I could not have faced such a long stretch away. Now I found I could not face the long year in cryosleep. Of course everyone who came to Mars had made these decisions. Despite such obstacles, the number of applications for flights increased month by month, as those returning reported on what for most was the great emotional experience of their lifetime. The UN and EUPACUS between them agreed on the legal limits of those permitted to visit Mars. Their probity had to be proved. So it had fallen out that those who came to Mars arrived either as YEAs or as DOPs. The arrangements for a Mars visit were long and complex. As EUPACUS grew, it became more and more bureaucratic, even obfuscatory. But the rule was quickly established that only these two categories of persons ever came to Mars, and then only under certain conditions. (This excluded the cadre needed for Martian services.)

The main category of person was a Young Enlightened Adult (YEA). This was my category, and Kathi Skadmorr's. Provision was also made for - the Taiwanese established this term - Distinguished Older Persons (DOPs). Tom Jefferies was a DOP. Once these visitors reached Mars - I'm talking now about how it was back in the 2060s - she or he had to undergo a week's revival and acclimatisation (the unpopular R A routine). Maybe they also saw a psychurgist. R A took place in the Reception House, as it was then called, a combined hospital and nursing home run by Mary Fangold, with whom I did not get along. This was in Amazonis. Later other RHs were set up elsewhere. 'In the hospital,' Helen reminded me, 'you were given physiotherapy in order to counteract any possible bone and tissue loss and to assist in the recovery of full health. Why did you not accept the offer of psychurgy there and then?' This was when I had to admit to her that I was different. 'How different?' 'Just - different.' I did not wish to be explicit, which was perhaps a mistake. If you were unversed in history, you might wonder that anyone endured all these demanding travel conditions. The fact is that, given the chance to travel, people will endure almost any amount of discomfort and danger to get to a new place. Such has been the case throughout the history of mankind. Also you must remember that an epoch was drawing to a close on Earth. There was no longer the promise of material abundance that once had prevailed. Not through exploration, conquest, or technological development. The human race had proved itself a cloud of locusts, refusing to curb their procreative and acquisitive habits. They had sucked most of the goodness from the globe and its waters. The easier days of the twentieth century, with individual surface travel readily available, were finished. So for the young, us YEAs, harsh Martian conditions were seen as a challenge and an invitation. The experience of being on Mars, of identifying with it, was seen as worth all the time spent in community work and matrix travel. But somehow, with me ... well, it was different. I guess I just took longer to adjust. It was something to do with my personality. We have the testimony of an early Mars visitor, Maria Gaia Augusta (age twentythree) on video. Her report says: 'Oh, the experience must not be missed. I have ambitions to be a travel writer. I spent my YEA community service in the outback of Australia, seeding and tending new forest areas, and was glad to have a change. 'At the back of my mind was a decision to gather material on Mars for knocking copy. I mean, Mars was to me like just a shadowy stone in the sky. I couldn't see the attraction apart from curiosity. But when I got there - well, it was another world, quite another world. Another life, if you like. 'You know what the surface of Mars is? Loneliness made solid, rock solid. 'Course, there were restrictions, but they were part of the deal. I loved all the fancyshaped domes they're setting up in Amazonis Planitia. In the desert, in fact. They put you in the mood of some Arabian Nights fantasy. You get to thinking, "Well, look at the frugal life the Arabs used to lead. I can do that." And you do. 'I did the compulsory aerobic classes during my R A period after we had landed, and got to enjoy them. I had been a bit overweight. Aerobics is weird in lighter gravity. Fun. I met a very sweet guy in the classes, Renato, a San Franciscan. We got along fine.

'We enjoyed sex in that light gravity and maybe invented a few positions not in the Kama Sutra. Mars is going to be left behind in a few years' time, when we settle the moons of Jupiter. Sex will really be something out there, in real low gravity! Meantime, Mars is the best thing we got in that respect. 'Me and Renato got on the list for a four-body expedition beyond the domes. Fourbodies were then the standard package. I know it's different now. Two-bodies were considered too dangerous, in case one body got ill or something. Not that there are all that many illnesses on Mars, but you never know. 'We didn't go madly far, just to the Margarite Sinus, towards the equator, because of fuel restrictions, but that was enough. Of course, every little four-body had to have a scientific component - the buggy was like a small lab, complete with cameras and electrolysis equipment and I don't know what-all. Radio, of course, to keep us oriented, and listen out for dust storms. We were exploring the canyons in Margarite and we came on a great wall of rock, rubbed smooth by the wind. Me and Renato were seized with a mad idea. We slipped into suits - you have to wear suits - atmosphere there was about 10 millibars, compared to 1,000 millibars back on Earth. Any case, you couldn't breathe it. We got these paints from the buggy store, climbed outside and began to decorate the rock surface. The other couple joined in. There we were, actually alone on the open surface. Wild! 'And we painted a lovely luminous Mars dragon, flying up to the stars. We worked till nightfall, just using red, green and gold colours. To finish off, we had to turn on the buggy headlights. There was a sort of - well, I almost said religious feeling about what we were doing. It was like we were aborigines, making a sacred kind of hieroglyph. 'When we got back to base, we showed photos of the dragon around and nearly started a panic. Some people thought it was the work of autochthonous Martians! Quite impossible, of course, but some folk are incurably superstitious. 'No, I lapped up my time on Mars. It was a life apart. A formative experience. I longed to be out there alone, or alone with Renato, but that wasn't considered safe until my last month there. Just to be out in the desert at night, in a breather-tent, it's beyond description. You're alone in the cosmos. The stars come down and practically touch you. You just feel they should come right in and penetrate your flesh... 'It's contradictory. You're entirely isolated - you could be the only person who ever lived, ever - and yet you are an intense part of everything. You know you're - what's the word? - well, somehow you're an integral part of the universe. You are its consciousness. 'Like being the seeing eye of this incalculably vast thingme out there... 'I say it's contradictory. What I mean is the perception feels contradictory, because you've never experienced it before. You'll never forget it, either. It's a tattoo on your soul, sort of... 'Oh, sure, there were things I missed out there. Things I did without but didn't miss, and things I missed. What things? Oh, I missed trees. I missed trees quite badly at first. 'But my life has changed since I was there. I can never go again but I'll never ever forget it. I try to live a better life because of it. That's no joke in the muddle we're in here, downstairs on Earth.' END TAPE.

The 'fancy-shaped domes' to which Maria Gaia Augusta refers are the linked spicules, constructed from a small number of repetitive sections, which formed the basis of what was eventually to become Mars City or Areopolis. The monotony of this structure was relieved by conjoined tetrahedral structures, rather similar to those erected in the north of Siberia a few years previously. From orbit, this sprawling structure, white-painted against the tawny Martian regolith, made a striking pattern.

4 Broken Deals, Broken Legs Looking back, I see how silly I was in my early days - silly and shy. I worked in the biogas chamber unit, and practically took refuge there. Everyone else seemed so clever. Kathi was clever. Why did she seek out my company? Her interest at this time was in politics, about which she talked endlessly. Placements within the YEA and DOP brackets were systematically arranged through the Mars Department, under Secretary Thomas Gunther. Kathi had a particular dislike of Gunther, saying he was radically corrupt. Whether that was true or not - many people praised Gunther - there was always bad feeling over the placements. Who was accepted or not as a YEA was open to local manipulation. I thought the system worked pretty well, enabling as many people as possible to visit the Red Planet. The United States insisted that matrix travel (the term 'space travel' had become old-fashioned) was a democratic right. Kathi's main complaint concerned the whole business of selection as a YEA. To qualify within the 16-28 years age bracket we had to undergo a rigorous Genetic and Superficial Health Test as well as a GIQ Exam. The General Intelligence was supposedly free from cultural and sexual bias and intended to establish the emotional stability of the examinee. Kathi was one-eighth Aborigine, and swore this was held against her at the Sydney board. 'I came up against a filthy little man who gave me the final interview. Do you know what he said? Only my granting him sexual favours would get me through! Can you imagine?' I hardly dared ask what she had done. She tossed her hair back. 'What the hell do you think? I wasn't going to let him stop me. I let him screw me. Next day my boyfriend broke both his stinking legs in his back yard...' By far the greatest percentage of YEAs had no means by which to cover the exorbitant costs of interplanetary travel. Nor was financial payment allowed - although Kathi said this too could be arranged if you were one of the Megarich. Funding poured through the UN Matrix Tax to EUPACUS. Gunther was pocketing a 'whole river' of this money, according to Kathi. I had seen pix of Gunther and thought he looked nice. Having passed their exams, the young educated adults were allocated to stations in which to spend a year of community service. Some got lucky, some lived like slaves, as I did. Some laboured on newly established fish farms in Scapa Flow, or the anchovy nurseries off the west coast of South America. Some served in the great new bird ranges of the taiga, or in satellite manufactories, 2,000 miles above Earth. Some were sent to Luna to work on the underground systems as technicians. Kathi was lucky and went to Darwin and the Water Resources.

'And sitting there like a fat pig in a strawberry bed was Herby Cootsmith, a Megarich, squatting on his investments, gradually buying up all Darwin,' Kathi said. As a group, the YEAs were mistrustful of the socio-economic systems from which they emerged. They hated the disparity between the poor, with their harsh conditions and short lives, and the Megarich, whose existences were projected to extend over two centuries. Life for the Megarich, Kathi declared, misquoting Hobbes, was 'nasty, brutish, and long'. It was estimated that 500 people owned 89 per cent of the world's wealth. Most of them belonged in the Megarich category, being able to pay for the antithanatotic treatments. After your year's community service, you had to pass the various behavioural tests. Then you were qualified for the Mars trip. 'How did you manage?' Kathi asked. I hesitated, then thought I might as well tell her. 'A rich protector came forward with a bribe.' Kathi Skadmorr gave a harsh cackle. 'So we're both here under false pretences! And I wonder how many others -YEAs and DOPs?! Don't you just long for a decent society, without lies and corruptions?' It came as a surprise to me to discover that Tom Jefferies and his wife Antonia - both of them DOPs - had also used a bribe to get to Mars. That I shall have to tell about in a minute, and to describe Antonia's death. Antonia died so many years ago. Yet I can still conjure up her fine, well-bred face. And I wonder how different history would have been if she had not died. The DOPs were reckoned to have served their communities; otherwise, they would hardly be Distinguished. As Older Persons, they did not have to undergo the GIQ examination. However, the Gen S Health test was particularly rigorous, at least in theory, in order to avoid illness en route, that long, spiralling, burdensome route to the neighbouring planet. In some cases, behavioural tests were also applied. DOP passages were generally paid for by some form of government grant from their own communities. In the eighteenth century, Dr.. Johnson told Boswell that he wished to see the Great Wall of China: 'You would do what would be of importance in raising your children to eminence ... They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the Wall of China. I am serious, sir.' To have visited Mars brought a similar mark of distinction - conferred, it was felt, on whole communities as well as on the man or woman who had gone to Mars and returned home to them. One of the excitements of being on Mars was that one occasionally met a famous DOP, not necessarily a scientist, perhaps a sculptor such as Benazir Bahudur, a literary figure such as John Homer Bateson, or a philosopher such as Thomas Jefferies. Or my special friend, Kathi Skadmoor. I first saw Torn Jefferies from afar, looking sorrowful and remote, but I held the popular misconception that all philosophers looked like that. He was an elegant man, sparse of hair, with a pleasing open face. He was in his late forties. A vibrancy about him I found very attractive. So I was immediately drawn to him, as were many others. While I was drawn, I did not dare speak to him. Would I have spoken, had I known how our paths would

intertwine? Perhaps it is an impossible question - but we were destined to face plenty of those ... Many scientists went to Mars under the DOP rubric, among them the celebrated computer mathematician, Arnold Poulsen, and the particle physicist I have already mentioned, Dreiser Hawkwood. A percentage of those who had travelled on the conjunction flight became acclimatised to Mars and, because the work and lighter gravity there were congenial to them, stayed on. It should be added that many YEAs stayed on for similar reasons - or simply because they could not face another period of cryogenic sleep for the return journey. From 2059 onwards, as interplanetary travel became almost a norm, every Martian visitor was compelled by law to bring with him a quota of liquid hydrogen (much as earlier generations of air travellers had carried duty-free bottles of alcohol about with them!). The hydrogen was used in reactions to yield methane for refuelling purposes. Another factor powered the movement in the direction of Mars. Competition to exist in modest comfort on the home planet grew ever more intense. To gratify its desire for profit and then more profit, capitalism had required economies of abundance, plus economies of scarcity into whose markets its entrepreneurs could infiltrate. Now, under this guiding but predatory spirit, there existed only the voracious developed world and a few bankrupt states, mainly in Africa and Central Asia. Increased industrialisation, bringing with it global overheating and expensive fresh water, made life increasingly difficult and corrupted the competence of democracies. Prisons filled. Stomachs went empty. While there were many who deplored this state of affairs, they were as powerless to alter it as to stop an express train. Now a number of them had an alternative. The Martian community developed its own ethos. Being itself poor in most things, it proclaimed an espousal of the poor, downtrodden and unintelligent. More practically, it fostered a welcoming of the estrangement that Mars brought, a passion for science, a care for the idea of community. Most Martians had discarded their gods along with the terrestrial worship of money. They were thus able to develop a religious sense of life, unwrapped by any paternalistic reverences. Always at their elbows was the universe with its cold equations; living just above the subsistence level, the Martians sought to understand those equations. It was hoped that the tracing of the Smudge would resolve many problems, philosophical as well as scientific. We lived under stringent laws on Mars, laws to which every visitor was immediately introduced. The underground water source would not last for ever. While it did last, a proportion of it underwent the electrolysis process to supply us with necessary oxygen to breathe. Buffer gases were more difficult to come by, although argon and nitrogen were filched from the thin atmosphere. The pressure in the domes was maintained at 5.5 psi. It will be appreciated that these vital arrangements absorbed much electricity. Technicians were always alert for ways of extending our resources. To begin with they relied on heat-exchange pumps as generators, and photovoltaic cells.

I have to tell myself that I am a serious person, interested in serious matters. I will not speak of my increasing affection for Kathi Skadmorr, who after all is a marginal person like me, or my admiration for Tom Jefferies, who is a central person unlike me. Instead, I will talk about worms. In one Amazonis laboratory was a precious Martian possession - 'the farm', a wit called it. Dreiser Hawkwood had introduced it; his side interest was biochemistry. The farm was contained in a box two metres square and a metre and a half deep. In it was rich top soil from the Calcutta Botanical Gardens, expensively imported by courtesy of Thomas Gunther and his EUPACUS associates. In the box grew a small weigela and a sambucus. Below, in the soil, were worms of the perichaeta species, working away and throwing up their castings. The metabolism of the worms had been accelerated. Their digestion and ejection of soil was rapid. They worked at dragging down the leaves fallen from the plants, thus enriching the soil with vegetable and microbial life. The enriched soil was to be set in a bed inside one of the domes to provide the first 'natural'-grown vegetables. The tilth would eventually cover acres of specially prepared regolith, breaking it down under greenhouse domes into arable land. From this modest beginning in the farm, great things were to come. It is doubtful if Mars would ever have become more than marginally habitable without that lowly and despised creature, the earthworm, which Charles Darwin regarded so highly, not dreaming that it would one day transform an alien planet as it had transformed Earth itself. This new agricultural revolution, intended to supplement the food grown in chemical vats, was assisted by work carried out high above the Martian crust. Mars has two small satellites that chase across the sky, Swift and Laputa. Early astronomers had bestowed on these two small bodies the unbecoming names of Phobos and Diemos. Swift unwearyingly rises and sets twice in a Martian day. Landings have been made on both satellites. On Swift have been found metallic fragments, presumably the remains of an unsuccessful twentieth-century Russian mission. Working from a small base on Swift, a series of large PIRs - polymer inflatable reflectors - was set in orbit about Mars to reflect much needed sunlight to the surface. The PIRs are cheap, and easily destroyed by space debris, but equally easily replaced. The PIRs can be seen in daylight or at night, when they shine brightly unless undergoing occasional eclipse. It will be deduced from these developments that, despite all the protests, Mars was slowly and inevitably being drawn nearer to terraforming. Despite all the regulations, the pressure to live brought this change about. The observatory built on Tharsis Shield near Olympus Mons continued to yield results. The meteorite watch station became operative. The new branch of astrophysics studying the gas giants was officially named jovionics. The telescopes of the observatory tracked many asteroids. Dedication to research was a feature of the scientific atmosphere on Mars. There was little to distract the scientists, as the asteroid-watchers sought to prove the small bodies were the remains of a planet that, before being torn apart by forces of gravity, occupied an orbit between Mars and Jupiter.

Studies of magneto-gravitic irregularities revealed a remarkably high gravity reading for the region near Olympus Mons. I discovered that Kathi was interested in this. No such anomaly existed on Earth, she claimed. She was reading many scientific papers on her Ambient, and told me she believed there was a connection between magneto-gravitic influences and consciousness, so that at present she was looking for a dimensionless quality, but I did not understand her. When I questioned this connection she believed in, she explained patiently that there were electric and magnetic fields. Whereas electric charges were the direct sources of electric fields, as far as was known there were no equivalent magnetic charges - that is to say, no magnetic monopoles. The influence of hidden-symmetry monopoles on consciousness was subtle and elusive - or appeared to be so as yet. The sophistry underlying the apparently simple laws of the physical universe, the exceptional qualities of many elementary particles, might lead one to suspect the universe of possessing a teleological character. She was continuing the explanation when I had to admit I could follow her no further. With a sympathetic smile, Kathi nodded her head and said, 'Who can?!' She became inquisitive about my beloved Other in Chengdu. Feeling sorry I had mentioned her, I was not very forthcoming. Later, I saw she was interested in the question of consciousness; the existence of my Other, so simple to me, seemed to raise complex questions in her mind. There seemed little for biochemists and xenobiologists to do once it was agreed that Mars held no life and that its early life forms - archebacteria and so forth - had perished many millions of years before mankind appeared on Earth. The heliopause, with its strange turbulences, was studied. While Mars was regarded as a completely dead world, indications of life on Ganymede, one of the moons of Jupiter already mentioned, were observed by new instruments. But I am getting ahead of our history again. Things were well enough for the Martianterrestrial relationship, until the disaster occurred that changed the situation, entirely and for ever.

5 Corruption, Cash, and Crash You need to remember how complex and ill judged terrestrial affairs were up to this period. Among the harsh pleasures of Mars were many negative ones. I was particularly glad to escape the constant surveillance to which we had been subject. On Earth crime rates were such that every city, every road, every apartment house and condominium and almost every room in those buildings was watched day and night by the glass eyes of security cameras. The sellers of masks profited accordingly, and crime thrived. Oppression and blackmail prospered even more. The mansion of Thomas Gunther was well equipped with surveillance devices, including those of the latest type. The camgun for instance, would fire yards of adhesive at any visitor to the building whose characteristics were not held in its computer. Not all forms of crime yielded to inspection. Fraud and corruption could take place in broad daylight, with smiles to outface any camera. Smiles had been worn like masks in the upper echelons of the EUPACUS consortium. The collapse of the entire enterprise began with a seemingly small event in 2066. A senior clerk in the tall ivory-white tower in Seoul that was the main EUPACUS building was caught embezzling. The clerk was sacked. No charges were brought against him. He was found dead in his apartment two days later. Possibly it was suicide, possibly murder. But an electronic message was released, triggered by the stoppage of the clerk's electronic heart, to be received at the North American Supreme Court of Justice. It led the court to uncover a massive misappropriation of funds by EUPACUS directors. In comparison the clerk's misdemeanours were nugatory. A cabal of senior executives was involved. Five arrests were immediately made, although all managed mysteriously to escape custody and were not recaptured. Investigators visiting a vice-chairman's residence on Niihau Island, in the Hawaiian chain, were met by gunfire. A two-day battle ensued. In the bombed-out ruin of the palace were found disks incriminating directors of the consortium: tax evasion on a massive scale, bribing of lawyers, intimidation of staff and, in one instance, a case of murder. The affairs of EUPACUS were put on hold. EUPACUS offices were closed, sealed off for judicial investigation. All flights were halted, all ships grounded. Mars was effectively cut off. Suddenly the distance between the two planets seemed enormous. Our feelings were mixed. Along with alarm went a sort of pleasure that we had been severed from the contemptible affairs of Earth for a while.

We did not understand at first how long that while was to be. Earth's finances were entangled with the vast EUPACUS enterprise. One by one, banks and then whole economies went bust. Japan's Minister of Exterior Finance, Kasada Kasole, committed suicide. Four hundred billion yen of bad debts were revealed, hidden outside the complex framework of EUPACUS accounts. The debts stemmed from tobashi trading; that is, moving a client's losses to other companies so that they do not have to be reported. Chiefly involved was the Korean banking system, which had invested heavily in its own right in EUPACUS. An equities analyst said that the Korean won, closely linked to the Japanese economic system, was now standing against the US dollar at 'about a million and falling'. Recession set in, from which the EU was particularly slow to recover, as its individual members were forced, one by one, to close shop. All round the globe were companies and manufactories that had relied on or invested in EUPACUS business. Many were already in debt because of delayed payments. The closure of EUPACUS Securities led to a collapse of the world banking system. Shares fell to just over one quarter of their 2047 peak. Property values followed, leaving the PABS - Pacrim Accountancy and Banking System - with substantial bad debts and asset write-offs. The IFF was unable to muster a credible rescue package. The deflationary impact was already being felt in North America. The situation, said one US official, was deteriorating dramatically as Asian speculators were selling off their huge holdings of US financial assets in order to try and meet their obligations nearer home. 'The US home market is going into meltdown,' an official said. Only a month after this remark, the world's economy was in meltdown. We sat on our remote planet and watched these proceedings with a horrified fascination. Bad went to worse, and worse to worse again. There came the day when terrestrial television went dead. And we were truly alone. A fish stinks from the head. I'm told it's an old Turkish proverb. Despite the rigorous checks that had been set up by the UN, bad conditions and poor pay had made workers in the Marvelos Health Registration Department just as open to bribery as those at the top of the vast organisation. So it was that Antonia Jefferies and her husband Tom were able to pass the Gen S Health Test and travel to Mars on a CRT trip just under four years before EUPACUS collapsed, and the world economy with it. Antonia suffered from a cancer of the pancreas, on which she had refused to have nanosurgery; it was a long while before I discovered why. Nevertheless, the gallant woman was determined to set foot on the Red Planet before she became too ill to travel. Her interest was in the Smudge experiment, which she saw as an extreme example of the interlinkage between science and human life, for good or bad. She was a historian. Her boovideo, The Kepler Effect, had been a bestseller. Tom Jefferies had moved from employment as a theoretical physicist specialising in monopole research to what he called Practical Philosophy. His new profession brought him fame and the soubriquet the 'Rich Man's Tom Paine'.

Tom was in his early fifties. His wife was forty-eight. They had no children. He had married Antonia only after the cancer, then in her pancreas, had been diagnosed. The diagnosis had been in 2052. Roused from cryosleep, disembarking from their ship, the Jefferies went to the R A Clinic. Her cancer had not slept on the voyage. The diagnosis by Mary Fangold revealed that she was very ill. Tom told me later that Fangold was 'an angel', but was not able to provide a cure. At Antonia's request, Tom drove her in a buggy to the Tharsis Shield. They sat at nightfall with remoteness all about them - in Tom's words, 'with that singing quality which absolute isolation has' - as Earth rose above the horizon, a distant star. There Antonia died, lying and gasping out her life in her husband's arms. 'Thank you for everything,' she said. Those were her last words. He buried his face on her shoulder. 'You are my everything, my darling wife.' Tom Jefferies had to return to base when his oxygen was running low. A memorial service was held before Antonia's body was slipped into one of the biogas chambers. I saw her go. At that service, Tom vowed he would never leave the planet where his wife had died. He would dedicate himself instead to the stability of the Martian community. In fact, he all but gave up his research work in order to serve the community. Tom Jefferies came to the fore when EUPACUS collapsed and connections between Earth and Mars failed. It is amazing what the will of one man can achieve. I can see this must include some personal history, as well as the story of the development of Mars. I arrived on the same fridge wagon as did the Jefferies, and came to know both Tom and Antonia slightly in the R A Hospital. Kathi was helping out as a nurse and invited me in. Antonia's ivory-white face was so fine, so intelligent, it was impossible not to want to be near her. Tom was quite a large man, but elegant, as I have said. What is more difficult to tell is what set him apart from everyone else. His manner was less severe than well controlled. He showed great determination for the cause in which he believed, yet softened it with humour, which sprang from an innate modesty. He was not above self-mockery. In his speech, he adopted the manner of a plain man, yet what he said was often unexpected. Under the calm surface, he was quite a complex person. To give an example. At one time I happened to sit near to him at a communal meal, when I overheard a scrap of his conversation. This was shortly after his wife had died. Ben Borrow, his neighbour at table, had said something about 'soul' - I know not in what context. He butted in on what Tom was saying about the dimension and temporality of the universe being compatible with a human scale, remarking with a tinge of scorn, 'I want to talk about your soul, Tom, and all you'll talk about is the damned universe.' To which Tom said, 'But we can train ourselves to listen to two tunes at once, Ben.' Challenged to explain what exactly he meant, Tom gave as an example the view of Earth as seen from Mars. It was merely a dim star, often lost against the background of stars. It was clear to us that Earth was not the centre of the universe as was supposed for many centuries. 'But this is not to say that mankind is a meaningless accident,' he said. 'Indeed, our existence seems to depend on a number of strange cosmic coincidences involving the exothermic nuclear reactions that generate the heavier elements. Those elements are

eventually utilised to build living things. As you know, we are all constructed from such elements - dead star matter.' He looked about him to see that we understood what he was saying. 'This is proof of our intimate relationship with the cosmos itself. 'Of course, this creative process takes time. About ten billion years, in fact. Since we're in an expanding universe, it follows that its size is a function of its age. So why is the observable universe fifteen billion light years in extent? Because it is fifteen billion years old. 'It seems unlikely, bearing these facts in mind, that life could have evolved elsewhere much earlier than it did on Earth. There are no Elder Gods. 'So why have we come into existence? Possibly because we are an integral part of the design plan of the universe. Not accidental. Not irrelevant! 'Each one of us is insignificant in him or her self. But as a species ... Well, perhaps we should reconsider what a universe is, what it means. Without itself being conscious, it may need a consciousness fully to exist. 'By coming to Mars, we may be enacting the first minute step of a vast process. Whether we are up to seeing the process through, well...' 'Quite, quite,' agreed Ben, hastily. 'Mmm. Well... Let's see...' That was one of the things which set the wonderful Tom Jefferies apart. He could always hear two opposed tunes playing and make harmony from them, possibly because he had trained himself to think of unimaginably distant futures. Of course I attended Antonia's memorial service. I was full of grief - hers was the first death on Mars, and a man wrote an elegy on it. At the time of the EUPACUS collapse, when we found we were stuck on the Red Planet, all hell broke loose. There was rioting, and I was witness to one incident that Tom quelled with a quick answer. An idiot was trying to incite violence, shouting out that they must destroy the domes. 'We've been lied to. Our lives have been stolen. What they call civilisation is just a sham, a stinking sham. There's no truth - it's all a lie. Burn the place down and have done, it's all a big lie. Everything's a lie!' Tom stood up, saying loudly, 'But if that were true, then it would be a lie.' Silence. Then strained laughter. The crowd stood about uneasily. The orator disappeared. The domes were not destroyed. It must be admitted, I was in despair; I was really scared of being stuck on Mars for any length of time. I took a buggy from the buggy rank without authorisation and made off into the steeps of Tharsis to hide myself away, to commune with myself, to adjust. Although I spoke with my Other, she was a nothing, a green weed floating under water. When night was coming on, I parked myself on the edge of a gully and watched darkness gather, comforted in a way by its remorseless advance, as death had advanced on Antonia. Whatever you do, I thought to myself, the darkness is always encroaching. A wind rose. A dust storm brewed up from nowhere. Sudden gusts slammed against my vehicle. It seemed to stagger. Then it was falling over and over, down the gully. I struck my head on a support and became unconscious, although curiously aware all the while.

In that trance-like state, the person with whom I was closest came to stand by me. She sat in a room with a wide window overlooking the Pearl River and unbound her piled dark hair. This she shook out in a dark shower, to show that she knew of my ill fortune and grieved for me. In her hands she held a silver carp, the meaning of which I did not understand. The carp swam from her grasp, through the pure air. When my senses returned I was confusedly aware of a pain and a light. The pain came from my right leg - or was it coming from the pinpoint of light glaring at me over a shoulder of Tharsis? Waves of pain prevented me from thinking coherently. Eventually I managed to drag myself up. Then I realised that the light I had seen was Saturn, shining low over the rock. The buggy lay on its side against a cliff. By good fortune, it had not cracked open during the drop, or I would have died from lack of oxygen while senseless. Yet I might as well have been dead. My trip having been unauthorised, I had no radio with which to summon help. Nor had I a suit in which to attempt to extricate myself. Could I have climbed into a suit? That was doubtful with my ruined leg. I could do nothing but crouch there, waiting to die. But the Martians look after their own. They had instituted a search once the buggy had been reported missing. When the dust storm died, they were out in strength. I became hazily aware of a noise overhead. A man was scraping the dust away from a side window and looking down at me. I could not recognise his face, and fainted away. When I roused, I was in a hospital bed, in the Reception House, coming round from anesthesia. A handsome but stern woman bent over me. Gently brushing my forehead with her hand, she said, 'You see, it was irrational to take out an unauthorised buggy, wasn't it?' Those were the first words Mary Fangold ever said to me. Only later did I find that my shattered right leg had been removed and a synthetic limb grown in its place. Now I understood the meaning of the silver carp that my dear friend had shown me in a dream. It swam away from her to indicate that one could live well without legs. Tom Jefferies came to visit me every day. It was he who had discovered me, trapped in my stolen buggy. Perhaps he felt he had been given my life to compensate for the loss of Antonia's. I loved him platonically. It was like a fairy tale. I clung to him. I could not let him out of my sight; he was to me the father and mother I had never had. When I was out of hospital, I besought him and besought him, as a man of destiny, to let me love him and look after him. So I became his adopted daughter, Cang Hai Jefferies. And all this time - little though I realised it - Tom was planning a constitution for Utopia, and holding discussions with people every day.

Testimony of Tom Jefferies

6 A Non-Zero Future! Stranded on Mars! Although I wished only to mourn the death of Antonia, some force within me insisted that I should turn to the future and face the challenge of existence on a Mars isolated for an indefinite period. This necessity became more urgent when we were confronted by a wave of suicides. There were those whose spirit was not strong enough to face this challenge. Whereas I saw it as an opportunity. Perhaps it was curiosity that drove me on. Taking command, I ordered that there should be only one memorial service for all suicides, which numbered thirty-one, the majority of them single men in their thirties. I viewed the act of despair with some contempt and saw to it that the memorial service was kept short. At its conclusion the corpses were consigned to the biogas chambers below ground. 'Now we are free to build our future constructively,' I declared. 'Our future lies in operating as a unit. If we fail to cooperate - zero future!' The strange airless landscapes beyond our domes had only a remote relationship with our existences; our task was to make good what was inside, not outside, the domes. And since I had taken command - though not without opposition - a grand plan developed slowly in my mind: a plan to transform our society, and hence humanity itself. I called people together. I wanted to address them direct and not through the Ambient. 'I'm going to kick down a rotten door. I'm going to let light in on human society. I need your help to do it.' That's what I said. 'I'm going to make us live as we dream of being great and wise people, circumspect, daring, inventive, loving, just. The people we deserve to be. 'All we have to do is dare to throw away the old and difficult crooked ways and leap towards the new and difficult and wonderful!' I was determined that the collapse of EUPACUS and our subsequent isolation on Mars - for however long that might be - should not be viewed negatively. After the considerable sacrifices everyone had made to reach the Red Planet, we had to struggle to exist, to prove something. With the death of my beloved wife, I decided I would never leave Mars, but remain here all my days, finally to mingle my spirit with hers. Ambient was already in place. Working with other technicians, we extended it so that everyone had a station. I now sent out a nine-point questionnaire, enquiring into which features of terrestrial life we who were temporarily stranded on Mars were most pleased to escape. I asked for a philosophical approach to the question; such factors as bad housing, uncertain climatic conditions, etc., were to be taken for granted.

Instead of isolating myself with any period of mourning, I set about analysing the responses I received. Remarkably, 91 per cent of the domes' inhabitants answered my questionnaire. Enlisting the assistance of able organisers, I announced that there would be a meeting to discuss the ways in which we might govern ourselves happily, in justice and truth. All Martian citizens were invited to attend. At this momentous meeting, a great crowd assembled in our grandest meeting-place, Hindenburg Hall. I took the chair, with the distinguished scientist, Dreiser Hawkwood, at my right hand. 'There is only one way in which we can survive the crisis of isolation,' I said. 'We must cooperate as never before. We do not know how long we will have to stay on Mars with our limited resources. It will be sensible to anticipate a long stay before world finances and the pieces of EUPACUS are put together again. We must make the best of this opportunity to work together as a species. 'Do not let us regard ourselves as victims. We are proud representatives of the human race who have been granted an unique chance to enter into an unprecedented degree of cooperation. We shall make ourselves and our society anew - to turn a new page in human history, as befits the new circumstances in which we find ourselves.' Dreiser Hawkwood rose. 'On behalf of the scientific community, I welcome Tom Jefferies's approach. We must work as a unit, setting aside nationality and self-interest. Without attributing intention to what looks like blind chance, we may be given this opportunity to put ourselves to a test, to see what miracles unity can work. 'The humble lichen you see on boulders or stonework back home can flourish in the most inhospitable environments. Lichen is a symbiosis between an alga and a fungus. We might regard that as an inspiring example of cooperation. On this boulder, on which we are temporarily stranded, we will also survive. 'Remember that our survival is necessary for more than personal reasons, important though those are. We scientists are here to press forward with the Smudge Project, in which much finance and effort has been invested. A positive result will influence the way in which we comprehend our universe. For a successful outcome, here too we need unity and what we used to call good old team work...' Heartened by Hawkwood's support, I went on to say, 'In our misfortune we can see great good fortune. We are in a position to try something new, revolutionary. We have here a population equivalent to that of ancient Athens in numbers - and in intellect about equal - and in knowledge much greater. We are therefore ideally placed to establish a small republic for ourselves, banning those elements of existence we dislike, as far as that is possible, and enshrining the good in a constitution upon which all can agree. That way we can flourish. Otherwise, we fall into chaos. Chaos or new order? Let's talk about it.' As I spoke, I heard murmurs of dissent from the audience. Among the visiting YEAs were many who cared nothing for the Smudge Project and regarded Hawkwood as a career man. A Jamaican TV star, by name Vance Alysha, one of the YEAs, spoke for many when he rose and said, 'This Smudge Project is typical of the way science has become the tool of the rich. It's all abstract nowadays. There was a time when scientific, or let's say technological, advance brought the poor many advantages. It made life easier -you know, motorbikes, motor cars, refrigerators, radio, of course, and the television. All that was

practical, and benefited the poor all over the world. Now it's all abstract, and increases the gulf between rich and poor - certainly in the Caribbean, where I come from. Life becomes harder all the time for our people.' There were murmurs of approval from the hall. Dreiser asked, 'Is it an abstraction that such ills as cancer and Alzheimer's disease are now curable? We cannot predict exactly what the Smudge will bring, but certainly we would not be here on Mars without investment in the research.' At this point a young dark-eyed woman stood up and said, in clear tones, 'Some may view our being stranded here as a misfortune. They should think again. I would like to point out that our being here, living in the first community away from Earth and Luna, comes as the end result of many kinds of science and knowledge accumulated throughout the centuries - science both abstract and practical. 'We're fooling ourselves if we don't grasp this opportunity to learn new things.' As she sat down, Hawkwood leaned forward and asked her what sort of things she imagined we should learn. She stood up again. 'Consciousness. Our faulty consciousness. How does it come about? Is it affected perhaps by magneto-gravitic forces? In the lighter gravity of Mars, will our consciousness improve, enlarge? I don't know.' She gave an apologetic laugh. 'You're the scientist, Dr. Hawkwood, not I.' She sat down, looking abashed at having spoken out. 'May I ask your name?' This from Hawkwood. 'Yes. My name is Kathi Skadmorr and I come from Hobart in Tasmania. I worked in Water Resources in Darwin for my community year.' He nodded and gave me a significant look. Assembled in the Hindenburg Hall were almost all the men, women, and children on the planet. Since there were insufficient chairs to seat everyone, boxes and benches were drawn up. When everyone was as comfortable as could be, the discussion proper began. It was interrupted almost at once by a commotion from the rear door, and female cries for us to wait a minute. In came three overalled women from Communications, bringing with them lights and video cameras. The leader, Suung Saybin, showed herself to be a perceptive woman. She had thought of something that had not occurred to the rest of us. 'Allow us to set up our equipment,' she said. 'This may prove an historic occasion, which must be recorded for others to study.' The scene was lit, she gave the sign, we began our discussion. Almost immediately a group of six masked men charged the platform. Both Dreiser and I were roughly seized. One of the masked men shouted, 'We don't need discussion. These men are criminals! This dome remains EUPACUS territory. They have no right to speak. We are in charge here until EUPACUS returns—' But they were mistaken in naming EUPACUS so boldly. It had turned into a hated name, the name of failure, the label for those who had isolated us. Half the hall rose en masse and marched forward. Had any of the masked intruders been armed - but guns

were forbidden on Mars - there would have been shooting at this point. Instead, a fight ensued, in which the intruders were easily overpowered and Dreiser and I released. How were the masked men to be punished? All proved to be EUPACUS technicians in charge of landing operations, refuelling or repairs. They were not popular. I sent for six pairs of handcuffs, and had them cuffed around metal pillars for six hours, with their masks removed. 'Is that all their punishment?' asked one of my rescuers. 'Absolutely. They will not reoffend. They suddenly lost their authority. They are only disoriented by the new situation, as we are. Now everyone can have a look at them. That will be shame enough.' One of my attackers shouted that I was a fascist. 'You are the fascist,' I said. 'You wanted to rule by force. I want to use persuasion - to bring about a just and decent society here, not a mob.' He challenged me to define just and decent. I told him I would not define what the words meant just then, particularly since I had never experienced a just and decent society. Nevertheless, I hoped that we would work together to form a society based on those principles. We all knew what just and decent meant in practice, even if we did not define them with precision. And I hoped that in a few months we would recognise them as prevailing in Mars City. The man listened closely to this, pausing before he spoke. 'My name, sir, is Stephens, Beaumont Stephens, known as "Beau". I will assist your endeavours if you will free me from these handcuffs.' I told him that he must serve his punishment. Then he would be welcome to help me. Our forum found a powerful supporter in Mary Fangold, the woman who ran the Reception House. She was a neat, rather severe-looking woman in her late thirties, of Mediterranean cast, with dark hair cut short, and striking dark blue eyes. I had developed a strong liking for her through her kindness to Antonia in the latter's last days. 'If we are to survive here as a society, then everyone must be given a chance to be part of that society.' Her voice, while far from shrill, held a ring of conviction. I was to find that indeed she was a woman with a strong will. 'On Earth, as we all know, millions of people are thrown on the scrap heap. They're unemployed, degraded, rendered useless, while the rich and Megarich employ androids. These wasteful creatures are the new enemies of the poor - as well as being inefficient. 'It's no good talking about a just society. First of all, we must ensure that everyone works, and is kept busy at a job that suits her or his intellect.' 'What job is that?' someone shouted. Mary Fangold replied coolly, 'My Reception House must become our hospital. I need enlarged premises, more wards, more equipment of all kinds. Come and see me tomorrow.' While I had anticipated that many of us would harbour negative responses, even feeling suicidal, about being stranded on Mars, I had not expected so many clearly stated objections to everyday existence on Earth. These the forum wished to discuss first of all, as bugbears to be disposed of.

These bugbears came roughly under five heads, we finally decided. The first four were Mistaken Historicism, Transcendics, Market Domination and Popular Subscription, all of which made existence more difficult than it need be for the multitudinous occupants of our green mother planet. Fifthly, there was the older problem of the rich and the poor, the Haves and Have Nots, a problem of heightened intensity since a long-living Megarich class had developed. When it came my turn to sum up the debate, which continued for some days, I had this to say (I'm checking here with the records): 'Some issues on Earth are much discussed, or at least make the headlines. They consist in the main of crime, education, abortion, sex, climate, and maybe a few other issues of more local interest. These issues could be fairly easily dealt with, if the will were there. 'For instance, education could be improved if the teaching profession were paid more and better respected. That would happen if children and their futures were the subject of more active general concern. And, if that were the case, then crime rates would fall, since it is the disappointed and angry child who becomes the adult lawbreaker. And so on. 'Unfortunately, a dumbing-down of culture has precluded the general consideration of five issues about which you have expressed unhappiness. They are far less easy to deal with, being more nebulous. Perhaps they are difficult to discern in the general hubbub of competing voices and anxieties. The six thousand of us assembled here must seize on the time and chance we have been given to consider and, if possible, to eliminate these issues. 'I will take these issues, which do not mirror our needs for a decent society and are impediments to such a society, one by one, although they are interrelated. 'Mistaken Historicism is a clumsy label for the problems of squaring a global culture with varied local traditions. The problems spring perhaps from conflating human history with evolutionary development. We are prone to conceive of deep cultural differences as merely an episode on the way to a universal consensus - a developmental phase, let's say, to an homogenous civilisation. Our expectation is that these various local traditions will die out and the global population become homogenised. This idea is patronising, and will not hold water much longer, as the days of Euro-Caucasian hegemony draw to a close. 'For example, we cannot expect the quarter of the terrestrial population that speaks a Chinese language to convert to English instead. Nor can we expect those whose faith is in Mohammed to turn into churchgoers of the Methodist persuasion. The Chinese and the Muslims may fly by airplanes manufactured in the United States for at least a few decades longer: that does not alter their inward beliefs in the superiority of their own traditions one whit. 'We observe the tenacity of tradition even within the European Union. A Swede may spend all his working life in Trieste, designing parts for the fridge wagons; he may speak fluent Italian and enjoy the local pasta; he may holiday on the beaches of Rimini. But, when it comes time to retire, he returns to Sweden, buys a bungalow in the archipelago, and behaves as if he had never left home. He soon forgets how to speak Italian. 'Our traditional roots are valuable to us. We may argue whether or not they should be, but the fact remains that they are. Nor are the arguments against them always valid. 'For instance, such roots are supposedly the cause of war. True, certainly they have been in the past. There were the Crusades, the Opium Wars against China, and so on and so forth. But modern wars, when they happen, are most frequently not between different

civilisations but are waged among the same civilisations, as were the terrible wars in Europe between 1914 and 1918 and 1939 and 1945. 'The mistaken assumption that cultural differences are going to disappear and a single civilisation will prevail, perhaps in the manner of Mr. H.G. Wells's Modern Utopia, has precluded constructive intellectual thought on ways to ease friction between cultures which are, in fact, permanent and rather obdurate features of the world in which we have to live. The sorry tale of the conflict between Israel and Palestine is a recent example of the ill effects of Mistaken Historicism. 'If we could drop our Mistaken Historicism, we might establish more effective international buffers for intercultural relationships.' At this point there was an important intervention by a small sharp-featured man with scanty white hair. He rose and introduced himself as Charles Bondi, a worker on the Smudge Project, whom we already knew was one of the prime movers of the scientific project. 'While I take your point about linguistic differences and religious differences and so forth,' he said, in a pleasant husky voice, 'these are all global items we have learned to put up with, and to some extent overcome. I believe it might be claimed that cultural differences are dying out, at least where it matters, in public relations. Certainly there is evidence of a fairly general wish to help them die out, or else we would have no revived United Nationalities. 'You could argue, indeed, that Mistaken Historicism was mistaken but is no longer. Don't we see a convergence in prevailing attitudes of materialism, for instance, in East and West - and all points in between? What we want is a new idea, something that overrides cultural difference. I believe that the revelations that the detection of a Smudge phenomenon will grant us could be that transforming idea.' 'We'll discuss that question when a Smudge has been identified,' I said. 'Smudge interception is vastly more likely than Utopia,' Bondi said, sharply. I thought it wiser not to answer, and continued with my list. 'We come next to Transcendics. I use the term rather loosely, not in the Kantian sense, but to mean the transcendence of humanity over everything else on the globe. Perhaps anthropocentrism would be a better word. Despite the growth of geophysiology, people by and large value things only as they are useful for human purposes. The rhinoceros, to take an obvious example, was hunted to extinction within the last forty years, simply because its horn was valued as an aphrodisiac. This splendid creature was killed off for an erroneous notion. 'But more widely we still use our seas as cesspits and our globe as a doormat. We take and take and consume and consume. We have a belief that we are able to adapt to any adverse change, and can survive and triumph, in spite of all the diseases that rage among us - in many cases diseases we have provoked through our ruination of the balance of nature. For instance when that vegetarian grazing animal, the cow, was fed meat and offal, bovine spongiform encephalitis infected herds and spread to the perpetrators of the crime. 'The myth of man's superiority over all other forms of life is, I'm bound to say, propagated by the Judaic and Christian religions. The truth is that the globe would thrive without human beings. If our kind was wiped from the earth, it would heal over in no time and it would be as if we had never been...'

At this point, reflection on the miseries we had created for ourselves on the beautiful terrestrial globe overcame me. I cried aloud in protest at my own words, knowing in my heart that, though we must make the best of our opportunities on Mars, Mars would never be the lovely place that Earth was, or had been. Perhaps I should interrupt my narrative here to say that the hall in which we held our public discussions was dominated by a blow-up of one of the most extraordinary photographs of the Technological Age. Towering over us in black and white was a shot taken in 1937 of an enormous firework display. When the Nazi airship the Hindenburg was about to attach itself to a mooring mast, having flown across the Atlantic to the United States, its hydrogen tanks exploded and the great zeppelin burst into flame. That beautiful, terrifying picture, of the gigantic structure sinking to the ground, may seem like the wrong signal to those who had crossed a far greater distance of space than had the ill-fated airship. Yet it held inspiration. It showed the fallibility of man's technological schemes and reminded us of evil nationalist aspirations while remaining a grand Promethean image. We spoke under this magnificent Janus-faced symbol. But, for a moment, I was unable to speak. Seeing my distress, Hal Kissorian, a statistical demographer and one of the stranded YEAs, spoke up cheerfully. 'We all have complaints against our mother planet, Tom, much though we love it. But we have to learn things anew, to suit our new circumstances here. Do not be afraid to speak out. 'Let me offer you and all of us some comfort. I have been looking into the computer records, and have discovered that only fifteen per cent of us Martians here assembled are the first-borns in their families. The great majority of us are later-born sons and daughters.' There was some laughter at the apparent irrelevance of this finding. Kissorian himself laughed so that his unruly hair flopped over his brow. He was a cheerful, rather wanton-looking, young fellow. 'We laugh. We are being traditional. Yet the fact is that over a great range of scientific discoveries and social upheavals which have changed mankind's view of itself, the effects of familial birth order have played their part.' At calls for examples, Kissorian instanced Copernicus, William Harvey, discoverer of the circulation of the blood, William Godwin with An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Florence Nightingale, The Lady with the Lamp', the great Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace, Marx, Lenin, Dreiser Hawkwood, and many others, all later-born progeny. A DOP I recognised as John Homer Bateson, the retired principal of an American university, agreed. 'Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, makes more or less the same point,' he said, leaning forward and clutching the chair back in front of him with a skeletal hand, 'in one of his essays or counsels. He says that, among children, the eldest are respected and the youngest become wantons. That's the term he uses -wantons! But in between are offspring who are pretty well neglected, and they prove themselves to be the best of the bunch.' This observation was delivered with such majesty that it incurred a number of boos.

Whereupon the retired principal remarked that dumbing-down had already settled itself on Mars. 'Anything can be proved by statistics,' someone called to Kissorian. 'My claim will demonstrate its validity here by our general contrary traits and our wish to change the world,' Kissorian replied, unperturbed. 'Our wish is to unite and change this small world,' I rejoined, and went on with my catalogue of the five partially concealed causes of global unhappiness. 'Our preconceived concept of mankind as master of all things prevents us from establishing sound institutions - institutions that might serve to provide worldwide restraints against the sort of depredations of which we have talked. Were it not for our anthropocentrism, we would long ago have established a law, observed by all, against the pollution of the oceans, the desecration of the land, and the destruction of the ozone layer. 'The myth that we can do anything with anything we like causes much misery, from the upsetting of climates onwards. As you all know, had we acted under that mistaken belief, Mars would now be flooded with CFC gases in an attempt to terraform it, had it not been for a good man as General Secretary of the UN and his few far-sighted supporters. 'Transcendics I regard as embodying something destructive in the character of mankind. For instance, the lust to obliterate old things, from buildings to traditions, which make for stability and contentment. Terraforming is just one instance of that intention. Yet new things have no rich meaning for us unless they can be seen to develop from the old. Existence should be a continuity. 'While I am no believer, I see the role of the Church - and its architecture - in communities as a stabilising, unifying factor. Yet from within the Church itself has emerged a retranslation of Bible and prayer into so-called plain language - a dumbingdown that destroys the old sense of mystery, reverence and tradition. We need those elements. Their loss brings a further challenge to family life.' 'Forget family life!' came a voice. 'Yeah, let's forget oxygen,' came a speedy rejoinder from my new supporter, Beau Stephens. For some minutes an argument raged about the value of family life. I said nothing; I did not entirely know where I stood on the question; mine had been a strange upbringing. I held what I considered an old-fashioned view: that at the centre of 'family life' was the woman who must bring forth a new generation, and both she and her children needed such protection as a male could give. Undoubtedly, the time would come when the womb was superseded. Then, I supposed, family life would fade away, would become a thing of the past. After a while, I called for order and returned to my list of discontents. 'Let's move on to the third stumbling block to contentment, Market Domination another little item we have escaped here on Mars. We have all felt, since we came here, the relief of having no traffic with money. It feels strange at first, doesn't it? 'Money, finance, has come increasingly to dominate every facet of life on Earth, particularly the lives of those people who have least, who are at the bottom of a wasps' nest of economics. How can we claim that all men are equal when on every level inequalities exist?

'It became a shibboleth in the twentieth century that maximum economic growth would resolve human problems. Earning power outweighed social need, as the quest for greater profit failed to count the cost in civilised living. 'One way in which this happened was in the dismantling of welfare provisions, such as health care, pensions, child benefit, unemployment allowances.' Mary Fangold interrupted. She stood tall and proud. 'Tom, I have been thankful to live on Mars, having to watch terrestrial affairs go from bad to worse. Perhaps the people there don't notice the decline. The dismantling of welfare provisions of which you speak has deepened a well of worldwide poverty. One result is an increase in many infectious diseases. 'We all know smallpox returned with the pandemic of about ten years ago. Cholera is rampant in the Pacrim countries. Many contagious diseases once thought all but vanished early in the century have returned. Fortunately those diseases do not reach Mars.' 'Sit down then!' someone shouted. Mary looked towards the interruption. 'Bad manners evidently have travelled. I am making a reasonable point and will not be deflected. 'I would like everyone here to realise how fortunate we are. The encouraging medical statistics put out by terrestrial authorities are often drawn from the Megarich class, who of course have their own private hospitals, and whose orderly records make them easy subjects for study. 'There is at present a serious outbreak of multiple drug resistance, notably of VRE, or vancomycin-resistant-enterococci, particularly in the ICUs in public hospitals. This is caused in part by the over-employment of antibiotics, while the synthesis of new and effective antibiotics has been falling off. Many thousands of people are dying as a result. Hundreds of thousands. Intensive Care Units are breaking down everywhere on Earth. 'A cordon sanitary exists between Earth and Mars. Because of the long journey time, anyone who happens to be carrying VRE or any virus or infective disease - not, alas, cancer, or any malfunctioning cellular illness' - here she glanced sympathetically at me 'will have recovered from the disease or have died from it. People do die in their cryogenic caskets en route, you know. Perhaps that statement surprises you. We try to keep it quiet. 'So all you YEAs and DOPs, do not wish the journey to take a shorter time. We are fairly safe from terrestrial disease. And that, to my mind, counts for more on the plus side than these dreary negatives we are listening to.' For her speech Fangold was applauded. She gave me a glance, half apology, half smile, as she sat down. I could only agree about the dreary negatives, and called a break for lunch. As usual, we all sat at long communal tables. We were served with vegetable soup, socalled, followed by a synthetic salami stew, accompanied by bread and margarine. Discussion ran up and down the table. Several voices were raised in anger. Aktau Badawi asked me what I was going to say about Market Domination. 'Is this about multinationals?' 'Not really. We all know about the biggest of the lot, EUPACUS, which has stranded us here. 'Downstairs, on Earth, work became an overriding imperative for those in whom poverty and unemployment had not become ingrained. The family mealtime, often rather

better than what we are getting now, where families talked and argued and laughed and ate in a mannerly way together, fell victim to the work ethic at an early stage. Fast food was often eaten while preparing to leave for work, at work, or in the streets. There was no mingling of the generations, such as we have here in Amazonis Planitia, no conversation. At least we have that,' I said, pushing my plate aside. 'If jobs were not available locally, then the worker must go elsewhere. In the United States of America, this was no great hardship; it was already a pretty rootless society, and the various states made provision for people to move from one state to another. Elsewhere, the hunt for jobs can mean exile - sometimes years of exile.' Aktau Badawi said, in his halting English, 'My family is from Iran. My father has a big family. He has no employ. His brother - his own brother - was his enemy. He travels far to get a job in the Humifridge plant in Trieste, on a distant sea, where they make some units for the fridge wagons. After a two-year, we never hear from him. Never again. So I must care for my brothers. 'I am like Kissorian has said, second brother. I go north. I work in Denmark. Is many thousand kilometres from my dear home. I see that Denmark is a decent country, with many fair laws. But I live in one room. What can I do? For I send all my monies to home. 'Then I do not hear from them. Maybe they all get killed. I cannot tell, despite I write the authorities. My heart breaks. Also my temper. So I rather do the community year in Uganda in Africa. Then I come here, to Mars. Here I hope for fairness. And maybe a girl to love me.' He hung his head, embarrassed to have spoken so openly. May Porter, a technician from the observatory, sitting next to him, patted his arm. 'Labour markets require high mobility, no doubt of that,' she said. 'Careers can count very low in human values.' 'Human values?!' exclaimed Badawi. 'I don't know its meaning until I listen today to the discussions. I wish for human values very much.' 'Another thing,' said Suung Saybin. 'Food warehouses dominate cities because, once a machinery of supply is established, it is hard to stop. Small shops are forced out by competition. Their closure leads to social disorder and the malfunction of cities. The bigger the city, the worse this effect.' A little Dravidian whose name I never learned broke in here, saying, 'There is always the excuse given by pharmaceutical manufacturers. They profit greatly from the sale of fertilisers and pesticides that further decimate wildlife, including the birds. My country now has no birds. These horrible companies claim that improved crop yields are necessary. This is one of their lies. World food production is more than sufficient to feed a second planet! There are 1.5 billion hungry people in the world of today, many of them personally known to me. Their problem is not so much the lack of food as lack of the income with which to purchase food already available elsewhere.' Dick Harrison agreed. 'Don't by this imagine we're talking only of starving India, or of Central Asia, forever unable to grow its own food. The most technologically advanced state, the United States, has forty million people on the breadline - forty million, in the world's largest producer of food! I should know. I came from New Jersey to Mars to get a good meal...' After the laughter died, I continued.

'The all consuming machinery of greater and greater production entails deregulation of worker safety laws and health provisions. In our lifetimes we have seen economic competition increasing between states. They must grow monstrous to survive, as trees grow to eclipse a neighbour with their shade. So bad capitalist states drive out good, as we see in South America. Greater profits, greater general discomfort.' At this point, I was unwilling to continue, but my audience waited in silence and expectancy. 'Come on, let's hear the worst,' Willa Mendanadum, the slender young mentatropist from Java, called down the table. 'Okay. The three concealed discomforts we have mentioned occasion much of the unhappiness suffered by terrestrial populations. They form the undercurrents behind the headlines. Where remedies are applied only to the headline troubles - capital punishment for murder, private insurance for accident, abortion for unwanted babies - they do little good. They merely increase the burdens of life. 'Why are they not thrown out and deeper causes attended to? 'The answer lies in Popular Subscription, our fourth impediment.' 'Now we're getting to it,' said Willa. Someone hushed her. 'What it means, Popular Subscription?' asked Aktau Badawi. 'We are conditioned to subscribe to the myths of the age. We hardly question the adage that fine feathers make fine birds, or that young offenders should be shut up in prisons for a number of years until they are confirmed in misery and anger. When witchhunts were the thing, we believed in witches or, if we did not believe, we did not like to speak out, for fear of making ourselves silly or unpopular. 'That fear is real enough, as we see in the instances of rare individuals who dare to speak out against unscrupulous practices in giant pharmaceutical companies or national airlines. Their lives are rapidly made impossible. 'It is Popular Subscription that permits the three other mistaken conceptions we've mentioned to beggar our lives.' 'This is no new perception, by the way, Tom,' came the supercilious voice of John Homer Bateson. 'The learned Samuel Johnson remarked long ago that the greatest part of mankind had no other reason for their opinions than that they were in fashion.' I nodded in his direction. 'The fifth of our bugbears is, simply, the prevalence of Haves and Have Nots - of the gulf between rich and poor. It has always existed on Earth. Perhaps it always will exist there. Now we have the new long-lived Megarich class, living behind its golden barricades. 'But here - why, on Mars we start anew! We're all in the same boat. We have no money. We're all dirt poor and must live at subsistence level. Rejoice that we have escaped from a deep-rooted evil - as deeply rooted as the diseases of which Mary Fangold has spoken. 'We six thousand Crusoes are cut adrift from these miseries - and other miseries you can probably think of. Our lives have been drastically simplified. We can simplify them still further by maintaining a forum here, wherein we shall endeavour to extirpate these errors of perception from our society. 'With a little team work, we can and we will build a perfect and just society. The scientists will do their work. As for the rest of us - why, we have nothing better to do!'

7 Under the Skin Needless to say, my summing up of mankind's problems did not go undisputed. At one juncture I was challenged to say what was the point of my lengthy disquisition. I responded, 'We are listing some of the preconceptions of which we must rid our minds. There are others to come. While we are here - while we have the chance - I want us to change, change for our own sweet sakes. We have been slaves to the past. We must become people of the long future. We must set the human mind free. Only then can we achieve the greatest things.' 'Such as what?' a YEA called. 'Once you have set your mind free, I will tell you!' Willa Mendanadum ignored this vital point. She summed up the opposition. 'These hidden stumbling blocks to mankind's happiness are interesting in their way, but are academic to our present discussion. If we wish to find a means to govern ourselves here, happily and justly, then we must forget about what they are up to on Earth. 'Besides, there are worse and more immediate impediments to our happiness than the ones you mention. If you take my own country, Indonesia, as an example, there you can see a general rule in operation, that big decisions are always made by well-fed people. The well-fed control the ill-fed, and it is in their interest to keep it that way.' Amid general laughter, as we acknowledged the force of this truism, someone intervened to say, 'Then we can make fair decisions here, because we are all ill-fed.' Another important statement was made by May Porter, who said, 'I like the word justice. I dislike the word happiness, always have done. It has a namby-pamby taste in my mouth. It was unfortunate that the American Declaration of Independence included that phrase about the pursuit of happiness being an inalienable right. It has led to a Disneyfied culture that evades the serious meaning -the gravitas, if you like - of existence. We should not speak of maximising happiness, but rather of minimising suffering. I seem to recall from my college days that Aristotle spoke of happiness as being only in accordance with excellence. 'It makes sense to strive for excellence. That is an attainable goal, bringing its own contentment. To strive for happiness leads to promiscuity, fast food, and misery.' Laughter and general clapping greeted this statement. As a break from all this debate, which I was not alone in finding exhausting, I did the morning rounds with Arnold Poulsen, the domes' chief computer technician, after the day's communal t'ai chi session. Poulsen was one of the early arrivals on Mars. I regarded him with interest. He was of ectomorphic build, with a slight stoop. A flowing mop of pale yellowish hair was swept

back from a high brow. Although his face was lined, he seemed neither young nor old. He spoke in a high tenor. His gestures were slow, rather vague; or perhaps they might be construed as thoughtful. I found myself impressed by him. We walked among the machines. Poulsen casually checked readings here and there. These machines maintained atmospheric pressure within the domes, and monitored air content, signalling if CO2 or moisture levels climbed unacceptably high. 'They are perfectly reliable, my computers. They perform miracles of analysis in microseconds which would otherwise take us years - possibly centuries,' Poulsen said. 'Yet they don't know they're on Mars!' 'If you tell them - what then?' He gave a high-pitched snort. They would be about as emotionally moved as the sands of Mars ... These machines can compute but not create. They have no imagination. Nor have we yet created a program for imagination,' he added thoughtfully. 'It is because of their lack of imagination that we are able completely to rely on them.' They could arrive swiftly at the solution of any problem set for them, but had no notion what to do with the solution. They never argued among themselves. They were perfectly happy, conforming to Aristotle's ancient dictum, as quoted by May Porter, that happiness was activity in accordance with excellence - whereas I felt myself that morning to be baffled and cloudy. Should I not have allowed myself to mourn in solitude the death of my beloved Antonia, rather than embark on the substitute activity of instigating a suitable Martian way of life? Against one wall of the computer room stood three androids. The computers would activate them when necessary. They were sent out every morning to polish the surfaces of the photovoltaic plates on which we relied for electricity. They had completed their task for the morning to stand there like butlers, mindlessly awaiting fresh orders. I remarked on them to Poulsen. 'Androids? A waste of energy and materials,' he said. 'We had to discover how to create a mechanical that could walk with reasonable grace on two legs - thus emulating one of mankind's earliest achievements! - but once we've done it...' Pausing, he stood confronting one of the figures. 'You see, Tom, they give off no CPS, no CPS. Like the dead ... Do you realise how greatly we humans depend on each other's signals of life? It emanates from our basic consciousness. A sort of mental nutrition, you might say.' I shook my head. 'Sorry, Arnold, you've lost me. What is a CPS?' Poulsen looked at me suspiciously, to see if I was joking. 'Well, you give one off. So do I. CPS is Clear Physical Signal. We can now pick up CPSs on what we call a savvyometer. Try it on these androids: zilch!' When I asked him what the androids were here for, he told me they had been intended to maintain the integrity of the air-tight structures in which we lived. 'But I will not trust them. In theory they're on lease from EUPACUS. You see, Tom, they're biotech androids, with integrated organic and inorganic components. I ordered BIA Mark XI - the Euripedes. The EUPACUS agent swindled us and sent these Euclids, Mark VIII, obsolete rubbish. I wouldn't entrust our lives to a mindless thing, would you?' The androids regarded us with their pleasant sexless faces. Turning to one of the androids, Poulsen asked it, 'Where are you, Bravo?'

The android replied without hesitation, 'I am on the planet Mars, mean distance from the Sun, 1.523691 AUs.' 'I see. And how do you feel about being on Mars as opposed to Earth?' The android answered, 'The mean distance of Mars from the Sun is 1.523691 AUs. Earth's mean distance is 1 AU.' 'Feel. I said feel. Do you think life's dangerous on Mars?' 'Dangerous things are life-threatening. Plagues, for instance. Or an earthquake. An earthquake can be very dangerous. There are no earthquakes on Mars. So Mars lacks danger.' 'Sleep mode,' Poulsen ordered, snapping his fingers. As we turned away, he said, 'You see what I mean? These androids have halitosis instead of CPS. They create hydroxyls. I rate certain plants higher than these androids - plants mop up airborne hydroxyl radicals and protect us from sick-building syndrome...' When I asked which plants he recommended, Poulsen said that it was necessary to maintain a clean atmospheric environment. Ozone emissions from electronic systems mixed with the chemicals humans gave off to form what he called 'sass' - sick air soups. Mary Fangold's hospital was handling too many cases of sore throats and irritated eyes for comfort. Selected plants were the things to swallow up the harmful sass. 'What can we do to ease the problem?' I asked. Poulsen replied that he was getting suitable plants into the domes. A consciousnessraising exercise would be the rechristening of streets and alleys with plant names. K.S. Robinson Avenue could become Poinsettia, and K. Tsiolkovski Place Philodendron. 'Come on,' I said. 'Who could pronounce Philodendron?' We both chuckled. Using my Ambient, I spoke to the YEA from Hobart, Kathi Skadmorr. Her manner was defensive. She looked straight at me and said, 'I happened to be viewing Professor Hawkwood's Living Without Knowing It.' 'I'm sorry to have interrupted you. What do you make of his theory of the coming of consciousness?' Without replying to my question, she said, 'I love learning - particularly hard unquestionable science. Only it is difficult to know what is actually unquestionable. I have so much to take in.' 'There are good technical vids about Mars. I can give you references.' 'So where is the dateline on Mars? Has that been established?' 'We have yet to place it. The question is not important yet.' 'It will be, though. If God wills it.' I gave a laugh. 'God hasn't got much to do with it.' I thought I detected contempt in her voice when she replied, 'I was speaking loosely. I suppose I meant some higher consciousness, which might well seem like a god to us, mightn't it?' 'Okay, but what higher consciousness? Where? We have no proof of any such thing.' 'Proof!' she echoed contemptuously. 'Of course you can't feel it if you close your mind to it. We're awash here with electromagnetic radiation, but you don't sense it. We're also awash with each other's CPS signals, isn't that so? Maybe consciousness, a greater consciousness - supposing that here on Mars - oh, forget it. Why are you logging me?'

The question somehow embarrassed me. I said, 'I was interested in the way you spoke up in our debates. I wondered if I could help in anyway?' 'I know you have been of great help to Cang Hai. But thanks, Dr. Jefferies, I must help myself, and stop myself being so ignorant.' Before she switched off, a ghost of a sweet smile appeared on her face. A mystery woman, I said to myself, feeling vexed. Mysterious and spikey. At one time, a woman called Elsa Lamont, a slip of a person with dyed-blonde hair cut short, came to my office, accompanied by a sullen-looking man I recognised as Dick Harrison. I had marked him out as a possible trouble-maker, although on this occasion he was civil enough. Lamont came to the point immediately. She said that my talk of terrestrial discomforts had ignored consumerism. It was well known that consumerism was responsible for much greed and injustice. She had worked for a big advertising agency with world-wide affiliations, and had been responsible for a successful campaign to sell the public Sunlite Roofs, at one time very fashionable, though scarcely necessary. She explained that their TV commercials had been aimed at everyone, although only 20 per cent of viewers could afford such a distinctive luxury item. However the remaining 80 per cent, knowing they could never afford such a roof, respected and envied the 20 per cent, while the 20 per cent understood this very well and felt their status increased by the clever commercial. Behind Lamont lay a period of art training. She woke one morning realising she disliked the nature of her advertising job, which was to make people feel greedy or ashamed, so she left the agency and worked to become a YEA and visit an ad-free world. Now she asked, would not people on Mars miss commercials, which had become almost an art form? We talked this over. She argued that we needed commercials to dramatise the concept of unity. She had been trained as an orthogonist at art school, and using orthogonal projection she could create figures on the walkways that would appear to be erect amusing figures, dancing, walking, holding hands. At this point she introduced Dick Harrison, saying that he had studied art and would assist her. It seemed to me that the idea had possibilities. If anyone volunteered to do anything, it was sensible to let them try. She was given Bova Boulevard to experiment on. Soon she and Harrison had covered the street with amusing Chirico-like figures, without faces, dancing, jumping, cheering. From a distance, they did seem to stand up from the horizontal. It was clever. But no pedestrian could bring themselves to walk on the figures, which meant the boulevard was virtually closed. It was clever, but it was a failure. However I liked Elsa Lamont's energy and ideas, and later appointed her to be secretary of Adminex. Dick Harrison's future was less distinguished. In the space we used for our debating hall, many people were already assembled, discussing, arguing or laughing among themselves.

The subject that arose from the chatter and had to be formally addressed was how we should govern ourselves. Beau Stephens, who had long been released from his pillar together with his associates, suggested that he should be in command. His argument was that he remained a EUPACUS official and, when EUPACUS returned in strength, he would have to hand over affairs in an orderly and accountable manner. Amid boos, his bid was turned down. An argument broke out. The YEA faction did much shouting. Finally the tall bearded Muslim with whom I had already spoken, Aktau Badawi, rose to speak. He was born in the holy city of Qom, as he reminded us. It seemed that already his English was improving. Later I found that he was taking lessons from a fellow Muslim, Youssef Choihosla. Badawi said that shouting was never to be trusted. In the Muslim faith there was a saying: 'Do not walk on the Earth in insolence'. By and large, the Muslim nations rejected the present way of getting to any other planet; he was here only because he had been elected as a DOP. But he would not walk on Mars in insolence. He was content to be governed, if he could be governed wisely, by people who did not shout. But, he asked, how could they be governed if there was no money? If there was no money, then no taxes could be raised. Hence there could be no government. A thoughtful silence fell. This point had not been made before. I said that we needed an ad hoc government. It need only rule for a transitional period, until our new way of life was established. It would quietly wither away when everyone had 'got the message'. What did I mean by that? I was asked. 'All must understand that our limitations hold within them great possibilities for constructive life modes. We are operating in a radically new psychological calculus.' Rather to my surprise, this was accepted. Then came the question of what the government should be called. After a number of suggestions, some ribald, we settled for 'Administration Executive', or Adminex for short. We talked about the question of incentives. Not everyone could be expected to work for good will alone. Something had to replace money by way of incentive. Not on that momentous day but later, when Adminex held its first meeting, we drew up a rough schedule. Men and women could not be idle. To flavour the pot, incentives were necessary, at least at first. The degree of participation in work for the common good would be rewarded by so many square yards of floor living space. Status could be enhanced. Plants had scarcity value, and would serve as rewards for minor effort. A common Teaching Experience should be established. We had already seen how separation from the mother planet downstairs had engendered a general wish to stand back and consider the trajectory of one's own life. Personal life could itself be improved which was surely one of the aims of a just and decent society. Benazir Bahudur, the sculptor and teacher, spoke up shyly. 'Excuse me, but for our own protection we must establish clear prescriptions. Such as the rules governing water consumption. Increase of personal water consumption must not be on offer as a reward for anything; it would lead only to quarrels and corruption. 'All the same, my suggestion is that we women require a larger water ration than men because of our periods. Men and women are not the same, whatever is claimed. Washing is sometimes a priority with us.

'With none of the terrestrial laws in effect, and no money in circulation, education could play a greater role, provided education was itself overhauled. It must include current information. For instance, how much water exactly remains on this terrible planet.' As I was to learn later, this vital question of water resources was already being investigated by the science unit. Involved in these investigations was our lady from Hobart, Kathi Skadmorr. I had noted Dreiser Hawkwood's interest in her. He too had spoken to her by Ambient, and received a better reception than I had done. Dreiser had offered to coach her in science - in what he was now calling 'Martian science'. When he questioned her about her work with International Water Resources, Kathi had told him she had been employed at one time in Sarawak. I later turned up the record and heard her voice. 'My bosses sent me to Sarawak, where work was being done on the caves in Mulu National Park.' 'What are these caves?' Dreiser asked. 'You don't know them? Shame on you. They are vast. Great chains of interconnected caves. Over 150 kilometres have been explored. The Malaysians who own that part of the world are piping water to Japan.' 'What was your role in the project?' 'I was considered expendable. I did the dangerous bit. I did the scuba work, swimming down hitherto unexplored submerged passageways. With faulty equipment. Little they cared.' Dreiser gave a snort. 'You do see yourself as a victim, don't you, Ms Skadmorr?' She replied sharply. 'I'm Kathi. That's how I'm called. You must have some knowledge of the mysterious workings of the authoritarian mind. 'Anyhow, the fact is that I loved that work. The caves formed a wonderful hidden environment, extensive, beautiful, cathedrals in rock, with the water - sometimes still, sometimes racing - as their bloodstream. It was like being inside the Earth's brain. So you'd expect it to be dangerous. What's your interest in all this, anyhow?' He said, 'I want to help you. Come and live in the science unit.' 'I've had male help before. It always carries a price tag.' She raised her hands to her face to cover a naughty grin. 'Not this time, Kathi. There's no money here, so no price tags. I'll send a vehicle for you.' 'If I come to your unit, I want to walk. I need to feel the presence of Mars.' The first I knew of all this was when Kathi paid me a personal visit. Her claws were not in evidence. She needed my support. She was eager to see science in action and wished to go to the science unit but also to remain a member of the domes and retain her cabin with us. She had far more eyelashes, above and below her eyes, than most women. I agreed to her request without even consulting the other members of Adminex. 'Wouldn't it be simpler for you to remain in the science unit?' 'I have friends here, believe it or not.' She went. Although I do not wish to get ahead of my narrative, it makes sense to set down here what happened when Kathi came under Dreiser's wing.

Our overhead satellite had revealed what looked like entrances to caves in the vast stretches of the Valles Marineris, a kind of Rift Valley. This formidable feature stretches across the Martian equator for a total of some 34,500 square kilometres, almost a quarter of the surface of Mars, so that one sector can be in daylight while the rest is in night. For this reason, ferocious winds scour the valley. Marineris is like no physical feature on Earth. It is 100 kilometres wide in places and up to 7 kilometres deep. Mists roll down its length at daybreak. It is not a good place to be. This enormous rift was probably caused by graben events, when the relatively brittle crust fractured. Analysis shows that lakes had once existed along the base of Marineris. So Hawkwood decided that what seemed like cave entrances would be worth inspecting. He hoped to find reservoirs of underground water. This was in the third month of 2064. However, when assembling his expedition, he found he could muster only one speleologist, a nervous young low-temperature physicist called Chad Chester. To Dreiser's way of thinking, Kathi Skadmorr was much the more foolhardy of the two. Two buggies containing six people as well as equipment and supplies made the difficult journey overland. Dreiser had insisted on being present. He could strike up no conversation with the Hobart woman, who had retreated into an all-embracing silence. Kathi stared unspeaking at the Marscape. She had known not dissimilar landscapes back home, long ago. Her intuition was that the very antiquity of these empty vistas had rendered them sacred, as she told me later. She experienced a longing to jump out and paint religious symbols on the boulders they passed. At last they gained the comparatively smooth floor of the great rift valley. Its high wall towered above them. Of the cliff on the far side they could see nothing; it was lost in distance. They made slow progress against a strong wind and, when they came to the first three caves, found them blind. The fourth they were able to enter further. Kathi and Chester wore scuba gear. Chester had allowed Kathi to go ahead. Her headlamp showed that the passage was going to narrow rapidly. Suddenly, the floor beneath her caved in and she fell. She disappeared from sight of the others. They cried with alarm before advancing cautiously on the hole. Kathi was sprawling 2 metres below. 'I'm okay,' she said. 'It was a false floor. Things get more interesting here. Come on down, Chad.' She stood up and went ahead without waiting for the others. The rock in her path was tumbled and treacherous. She climbed down with the roof overhead narrowing, until she was moving within a chimney and in danger of snagging her suit. She called up to the rest of the expedition not to follow, else she would have been struck by falling rock. At last she reached the end of the chimney. Slipping amid scree, she was able to stand again - to find herself in a large cave, which she described over the radio as the size of a cottage - 'contemptible by the dimensions of caves in the Mulu Park area'. The floor of the cave contained a small pool of ice. The rest of the team cheered when they heard of this. Skirting the ice, Kathi explored the cave and reached a narrow cleft at the far end. Squeezing through it, she entered a small dark hole. She was forced to crawl on hands

and knees to cross it, where she found a kind of natural staircase, leading down. This she reported to Dreiser. 'Take care, damn it,' he said. The staircase widened. She squeezed past a boulder and found herself in a larger cavern, in cross-section resembling a half-open clam. The roof was scalloped elaborately, as if by hand, the ancient product of swirling water. And the floor of this cavern held a pool of water, unfrozen. She lobbed a small rock into it. Ripples flowed to the sides in perfect circles. Her heart was beating fast. She knew she was the first person ever to see extensive water in its free state on the Red Planet. She waded into it. The ripples stirred by her entry caused light patterns to play on the roof above. The water came up to her breasts and no further. She plunged and swam below the surface. Her light revealed a dark plug hole on the stony bed. She swam vertically down it, to find herself in a chimney with smooth sides. As it narrowed, she had to push against the sides rather than swim. The fit became tighter and tighter. She could not turn to go back. Her light failed. The team were calling her on the radio. She did not reply. She could hear her own labouring breath. She squeezed forward with great effort, her arms stretched out in front of her. The tube seemed to go on for ever as she moved, head down. She thought there was a dim light ahead, or else her sight was failing. She found herself shooting from the tube like a cork from a bottle. She was floundering upward in a milky sea. Her head emerged into the open. Breathing heavily, she managed to haul herself on to a dry ledge. She was in some sort of a natural underground reservoir. The ceiling was only 2 feet above her. She thought, 'What if it rains?' But that thought came from back in Sarawak, where even a distant shower of rain might cause water levels to rise dramatically and drown an unwary speleologist. On Mars there was no danger of rain. As her pulse steadied, she stared across the phosphorescent pool, whose depth she estimated to be at least 12 metres. Kathi knew that humble classes of aquatic animals emitted light without heat. But was there not also a mere chemical phosphorescence? Had she stumbled on the first traces of Martian life? She could not tell. But lying on the shelf of rock, unsure of how she would ever emerge again to the surface, she told herself that she was detecting a Martian consciousness. She looked about in the dimness: there was nothing, only the solemn slap of water against rock, reflected and magnified by the low roof overhead. Was she not in the very throat of the monster? She lay completely still, switching off her radio to listen, there, at least a kilometre beneath the surface of the planet. If it had a heart, she was now a part of it. The situation was somewhat to her liking. When she switched on her radio, the babble of humanity came to her. They were going to rescue her. Chad was possibly in an adjacent chamber. She was to stay put. Was she okay? Without deigning to answer that, she reported that the temperature reading was 2 degrees above zero Celsius and that she had taken a water sample. She still had a reserve

of 3.6 hours of air. Sure, she would stay where she was. And she would keep the radio on. She lay on the ledge, perfectly relaxed. After a while she swam in the phosphorescent reservoir. At one corner, water fell from the roof in a slow drip, every drop measuring out a minute. Raising herself in the water, her fingers detected a crevice in the rock overhead. Hauling herself up, she found she could thrust her arm into a niche. With this leverage she could also wedge a foot in the niche, and so cling, dripping, above the water. By slow exploration, she was able to ease herself into the rock. She cursed the lack of light, and cursed her failed headlight. Inch by painful inch, she dragged herself through the broken rock fissures. She was in total darkness, apart from an occasional glint of falling water drops. She struck her head on rock. The one way forward was to twist over on her back and propel herself by hands and feet. She worked like that for ten minutes, sweating inside her suit. Then she was able to get on to her hands and knees. Gingerly she stood up. Hands stretched before her, she took a step forward. Something crackled beneath the flippers of her suit. She felt and brought up a fragment of ice. In so doing, she clipped her headlamp against rock. Feeling forward, she came on sharp rock everywhere. She stood in the darkness, nonplussed. When she stretched her arms out sideways, she touched rock on either side. As far as she could determine, she was trapped in a narrow fissure. In the pitch dark, the fallen rocks were too dangerous to negotiate. So she stood there, unable to move. At length, with what seemed to her like unutterable slyness, the dimmest of lights began to glow. Slowly the illumination brightened. Coming from a distant point, it showed Kathi that she was indeed standing in the merest crack between two rough shoulders of rock. The floor of this crack was littered with debris. She recognised a vadose passage, formed by a flow of water cutting into the rock. She summoned up all her courage. With her awe came a cold excitement. She was convinced that she had intruded into a lofty consciousness and that some part of it whether physical or mental - was now approaching her. Her upbringing had accustomed her to sacred places. Now she must face the wrath or at best the curiosity of something, some ancient unknown thing. She felt her lower jaw tremble as the light increased. There was nowhere she could run to. The light became a dazzle. 'Oh, there you are! Why did you rush off like that?' said Chad Chester, in an annoyed voice. 'You could have been in deep shit.' She was back in the buggy, sipping hot coffdrink. Dreiser put an arm protectively about her shoulders. 'You gave us all quite a scare.' 'Why wasn't your lousy headlamp maintained? You're as bad as the slavedrivers in Sarawak.' 'At least we have established the existence of subterranean water, thanks to you,' he said comfortably.

8 The Saccharine/Strychnine Drip Meanwhile our humdrum lives in the domes were continuing, but I at least was filled with optimism regarding our plans, which ripened day by day. Adminex circulated our findings on the Ambient and published them on impounded EUPACUS printers. We emphasised that people must be clear on what was acceptable. We invited suggestions for guiding principles. We suggested a common meeting for discussion in Hindenburg every morning, which anyone might attend. We placed a high priority on tolerance and the cultivation of empathy. We concluded by saying, What Cannot be Avoided Must Be Endured. I received a message back on my Ambient link, saying, 'Be practical, will you? We need more toilets, boss. What cannot be endured must be avoided.' I recognised Beau Stephens's voice. In those days, I became too busy to think about myself. There was much to organise. Yet some things organised themselves. Among them, sport and music. I was jo-joing back from the new hospital wing when I saw the freshly invented game of skyball being played in the sports arena. I stopped to watch. Aktau Badawi was with me. Skyball was a team game played with two balls the size of footballs. One ball, painted blue, was half filled with helium so that, when kicked into the air, its descent was slow. Play could continue only when the blue ball was in the air. Grouping and positioning went on while it was descending. The blue ball could not be handled, unlike the other ball, which was brown. 'Thankfully, we are too old to play, Tom,' said Aktau. A young man turned from the watching crowd and offered to explain the subtleties of the game to us. We laughingly said we did not wish to know. We would never play. 'Nor would I,' the man said, 'but I in fact invented the blue ball in honour of our lighter gravity. My name is Guenz Kanli, and I wish to speak to you about another innovation I have in mind.' He fell in with us and we walked back to my office. Guenz Kanli had a curious physiognomy. The flesh of his face seemed not to fit well over his skull, which came to a peak at the rear. This strange-looking man came from Kazakstan in Central Asia. He was a YEA who, at twenty years of age, had fallen in love with the desolation of the Martian landscape. His eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks so mottled with tiny veins they resembled an indecipherable map.

He lived at the top of one of our spicules, which gave him a good outlook on the Martian surface. He described it in eloquent terms. 'It's all so variable. The wispy clouds take strange forms. You could watch them all day. There are fogs, and I have seen tiny snow falls - or maybe frost it was. The desert can be white or grey or almost black, or brown, or even bright orange in the sun. Then there are many kinds of dust storm, from little dust devils to massive storms like avalanches. 'None of this can we touch. It's like a form of music to me. You teach people to look inward on themselves, Tom Jefferies. Maybe looking outward is good too. 'We need more of a special music. It exists already, part sad, part joyful. 'If I may, I will take you to hear the wonderful Beza this evening.' Guenz Kanli was enthusiastic to a remarkable degree, which was perhaps what commended him to me in the first place. I dreaded that a mood of irreversible depression would descend on us if the ships did not soon return. That evening, we went to hear Beza play. I was seized with Guenz's idea, although I never entirely saw the connection, as he did, between Beza's gipsy music and the Martian landscape. There was always music playing somewhere in the domes - classical, jazz, popular, or something in between. But, from that evening on, one of our favourite musicians was Beza, an old Romanian gypsy. I persuaded the leading YEAs to listen - Kissorian, May Porter, Suung Saybin, and others. They were taken by it, and from then on Beza was in fashion. Beza had been elected as DOP - rather against his wish, we gathered - by a remote community in the Transylvanian highlands. To see Beza during the day, sitting miserable and round-shouldered at the Mars Bar or a cafe table, wearing his floppy off-white tunic, you would wonder what such a poor old fellow was doing on Mars. But when he took up his violin and began to play - bashavav, to play the fiddle - his real stature became apparent. His dark eyes gleamed through his lank grey hair, his stance was that of a youngster, and the music he played - well, I can only say that it was magic, and so compelling that men ceased their conversation with women to listen. Guenz sometimes took up his fiddle too and played counterpoint. With the fiddle at his chin and his bow dancing, Beza could play all night. His music was drawn from a deep well of the past, like wine flowing from centuries of slavery and wandering, rising from the pit of the brain, from the fibres of the body. These tunes were what is meant when music is said to be the first of all human arts. A time dawned when Guenz's theory that this was the true music of Mars became real to me. I wondered how it had come into being before Mars had ever been thought of as a place for habitation. After I had listened to Beza I would lie in bed, wide awake, trying to recreate his music in my head. It always eluded me. A slow sad lassu, with its notes long drawn out, would be followed by a sprightly friss, light and airy as a stroll along an avenue, which then broke into the wild exhilaration of the czardas. Then, quite suddenly, sorrow again, driving into the heart.

I must admit I learned these foreign terms from Guenz, or from Beza himself. But Beza was a silent man. His fiddle spoke for him. Beza's music was so popular that it became subject to plagiarism. In a small classical quintet was an ambitious Nigerian, Dayo Obantuji. He played the violin adequately, and the quintet was a success, perhaps because Dayo was something of a show-off. He liked to leap to his feet to play solos and generally appear energetic. The quintet became less popular while Beza's music was still the rage. Dayo was also a composer. He introduced a piece, a rather elegant sonata in B flat major, which he christened 'The Musician'. After 'The Musician' had been played several times, Guenz became suspicious. He made a public denunciation of the fact that much of the sonata, transposed into another key and with altered tempo, was based on a piece that Beza played. Dayo strongly denied the accusation. When Beza was brought into an improvised court as a witness in this case of plagarism, he would only laugh and say, 'Let the boy take this theme. It is not mine. It hangs in the air. Let him play with it - he can only make it worse.' There the matter was dropped. But 'The Musician' was not played again. Instead Dayo came to me and complained that he was the victim of racism. Why had this unfair charge been brought, if not because he was black? I pointed out that although Beza was himself of a minority - indeed a minority of one - he was almost the most popular man in Mars City. I said I felt strongly that racism had no place on the planet. We were all Martians now. Dayo must be mistaken. Angrily, Dayo asserted that I was denying what was obvious. He had been disgraced by the accusation. His name had not been properly cleared. He was the victim of injustice. A long argument ensued. Finally Guenz was brought in. He also denied prejudice. He had found an echo of Beza's music in Dayo's piece. It was hardly surprising, but there it was. However, he had been convinced that the similarity was accidental, so powerful was Beza's influence. He was content to believe that Dayo's name had been cleared. And he apologised graciously, if rather playfully, for having made the charge in the first place. Dayo again asserted he had been victimised. He burst into angry tears. 'Oh dear, the blue ball is in the air again,' said Guenz. Then Dayo changed tack. He admitted that he had stolen the theme from Beza's music, having been unable to get it out of his head. 'I admit it. I'm guilty as hell. You lot are guilty too. Okay, you show no racial prejudice against Beza and the Orientals, but you are prejudiced against us blacks. You secretly don't believe we're good for anything, though you'll never admit it. I'm quite a good musician, but still I'm a black musician, not just a musician. Isn't that the case? 'My compositions were not appreciated. Not until I took that Romanian tune and transcribed it. Didn't Brahms do the same sort of thing? What's wrong with it? I altered it, made it my own, didn't I? But just because I was black, you picked on me.' 'Perhaps the mistake was,' said Guenz, mildly, 'not to label the piece "Romanian Rhapsody" - to acknowledge the borrowing. Then you'd have been praised for your cleverness.' But Dayo insisted that he would merely have been accused of stealing.

'I meant no harm. I only wished to raise my status. But if you're black you're always in trouble, whichever way you turn.' He went off in dejection. Tom and Guenz looked at each other in dismay. Then Guenz broke into a laugh. 'It's you whites who are to blame for everything, including getting us here,' he said. 'My instinct is to legislate. But what could legislation do in a case like this? How might one word it? Can I ask you, Guenz, do you feel yourself racially discriminated against, as a Central Asian?' 'It has sometimes proved to be an advantage, because it had some slight novelty value. That's worn off. There was a time when people were suspicious of my foreignness, but that is in-built, a survival trait. I was equally suspicious of you whites. Still am, to a degree.' They discussed whether they had any extra in-built discrimination against the Nigerian, Dayo. Had they expected him to 'get away' with something? Had the dismal past history of white victimisation of blacks anything to do with it? Was there a superstitious mistrust of 'black' as a colour, as there might be of left-handedness? These were questions they could not answer. They had to conclude it might be the case. Certainly, they would be wary if a traditional green Martian appeared in their midst. They could only hope that such atavistic responses would die away as rational men of all colours mixed. We could only hope that the colour question would fade away, united as we were by a common concern regarding survival and in perfecting our society. However, the matter was to arise again later, and in a more serious case. During this period, I consulted with many people, delegating duties where it was possible to do so. Many people also came to my office to deliver advice or complaint. One of these visitors was a rather lacklustre-looking young YEA scientist. He announced himself as Chad Chester. 'Maybe you know my name as the guy who went down into the water caves off Marineris with Kathi Skadmorr. I guess I didn't make a great showing compared with her.' 'Not many of us do. What can I do for you?' Chad explained that he had listened to my lecture on the five obstacles to contentment on Earth. He noted that at one point I had referred to the slogan, 'All men are equal'. He was sure this saying embodied a mistaken assumption; he never thought of himself as equal to Kathi, for example. That experience in the caves had led him to put down his thoughts on paper. He felt that 'All men are equal' should not be used in any Utopian declaration we might make, for reasons he had tried to argue. When he had gone I set Chad's paper aside. I looked at it two days later. His argument was that the very saying was self-denying, since it mentioned only men and not women. It was meaningless to pretend that men and women were equal; they were certainly similar in many ways, but the divergence between them made the question of being equal (except possibly in law) irrelevant. Furthermore, the diversity of the genetic code meant a different inheritance of capacities even within a family.

'All men are equal' held an implication that all could compete equally; that also was untrue. A musician may have no capacity for business. A nuclear physicist may be unable to build a bridge. And so forth, for several pages. He suggested that a better slogan would be, 'All men and women must be allowed equal opportunities to fulfil their lives.' I liked the idea, although it had not the economy, the snap, of the original it replaced. I wondered about 'All dudes are different.' Any such sloganeering boiled down to one thing. It was important to have maximum latitude to express ourselves within the necessarily confining rules of our new society. Someone mentioned the dragon that earlier YEAs had painted on the rock face; they emphasised the way in which it had caused alarm, being unexpected. Yet creativity must continue to produce the unexpected or the community would perish. Although latitude was needed, it was generally accepted that our society had to operate within prescribed rules. Creativity we needed, but not stupidity and ignorance. We had begun to discuss education when a slightly built and handsome young woman with dark hair came forward. She poured out from the pockets of her overalls on to a central table a number of gleaming objects, various in shape. 'Before you speak of any orderly society, you'd better be aware,' she said, 'that Mars is already occupied by a higher form of life. They carved these beautiful objects and then, evidently dissatisfied with them, cast them away.' The room was in an uproar. Everyone was eager to examine the exquisite shapes, seemingly made of glass. Some appeared to be roughly shaped translucent models of small elephants, snails, labias and phalluses, puppy dogs, hippopotami, boulders, coproliths, and hedgehogs. All were bright and pleasant to the touch. The faces of those who picked up the objects were full of alarm. Always at the back of our minds had been the suspicion that the yet almost unexplored planet might somehow, against all reason, harbour life. The young woman allowed the drama of the situation she had created to sink in before saying, loudly, 'I'm an areologist. I've been working alone in the uplands for a week. Don't worry! These are pieces of rock crystal, chemical formula SiO2. They're just translucent quartz, created by nature.' A howl mingled with dismay and approbation rose. The young woman said with a laugh, 'Oh, I thought I'd just give you a scare while you were making up all these rules to live by.' I persuaded her to sit by me while the crowd reassembled. She was lively and restless. Her name was Sharon Singh, she told me. She was half-English, half-Indian, and had spent much of her young life in the terrestrial tropics. 'You can't find Mars particularly congenial,' I remarked. She gave a wriggle. 'Oh, it's an adventure. Unlike you, I do not intend to live here for ever. Besides, there are many idle and eager men here who enjoy a little romance. That's one of the real meanings of life, isn't it? Mine is a romantic nature...' She flashed a smile at me, then regarded me more seriously. 'What are you thinking?' I could not tell her, saying instead, 'I was thinking that we can sell these pretty rock crystal objects for souvenirs when matrix traffic resumes.'

Sharon Singh uttered a rather scornful laugh, momentarily showing her pretty white teeth. 'Some things are not for sale!' She gave her wriggle again. That night, I could not sleep. The smile, those dark eyes fringed by dense lashes, the carelessness, the wriggle - they filled my mind. All my serious contemplations were gone, together with my resolves. I thought - well, I thought that I would follow Sharon Singh to Earth, and gladly, if need be. That I would give anything for a night with her in my arms. In order to sublimate my desire for Sharon Singh, I made a point of talking personally to as many men and women as possible, sounding out their opinions and gathering an impression of their feelings towards our situation and the practicalities of living decently. My quantcomp rang as I was going down K.S. Robinson. A woman's voice requested an appointment. In another half-hour, I found myself confronting Willa Mendanadum and her large companion, Vera White. I saw them in my small office. With Vera in her large flowing lilac robes, the room was pretty full. Willa had a commanding voice, Vera a tiny one. 'As you will no doubt be aware, Vera and I are mentatropists,' said Willa. 'While we support your wish to form a Utopian society, we have to tell you that such is an impossibility.' 'How so?' I asked, not best pleased by her haughty manner. 'Because of the contradictory nature of mankind in general and individuals in particular. We think we desire order and calm, but the autonomous nervous system requires some disorder and excitement.' 'Is it not exciting enough just to be on Mars?' She said sternly, 'Why, certainly not. We don't even have the catharsis of S V movies to watch.' Seeing my slight puzzlement, Vera said in her high voice, 'Sex and Violence, Mr. Jefferies, Sex and Violence.' She spread "violence" out into its three component syllables. 'So you consider Utopia a hopeless project?' 'Unless...' 'Unless?' Vera White drew herself up to her full girth. 'A full course of mentatropy for all personnel.' 'Including all the scientists,' added Willa in her deepest tone. They departed in full sail when I thanked them for their offer and said Adminex would consider it. Kissorian came in and exclaimed that I looked taken aback. 'I've just met some mentatropists,' I said. He laughed. 'Oh, the Willa-Vera Composite!' And so they became known. We did not forget - at least in those early days - that we constituted a mere pimple on the face of Mars, that grim and dusty planet that remained there, uncompromising, aloof. Despite the reinforcements of modern science, our position was best described as precarious. The static nature of the world on which we found ourselves weighed heavily on many minds, especially those of delicate sensibility. The surface of Mars had remained stable, immovable, dead, throughout eons of its history. Compared with its restless neighbour

from which we had come, Mars's tectonic history was one of locked immobility. It was a world without oceans or mountain chains, its most prominent feature being the Tharsis Shield, that peculiar gravitic anomaly, together with the unique feature of Olympus Mons. Emerging from the hectic affairs of the third planet, many people viewed this long continued stillness with horror. For them it was as if they had become locked into one of the tombs in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. This obsessive form of isolation became known as areophobia. A group of young psychurgists was called before Adminex to deal with the worst afflicted cases. Some of them had earlier reproached me for the thirty-one suicides, saying their services, had they been called into action, would have saved the precious lives. I found among them an enormous respect for the Willa-Vera Composite; clearly the mentatropy duo were not the figures of fun I had taken them for. Psychurgy itself had developed from a combination of the old psychotherapy and more recent genome research; whereas mentatropy, embodying a new understanding of the brain and consciousness, was a much more hands-on approach to mental problems. The psychurgists reported that sufferers from areophobia endured a conflict of ideas: with a fear of total isolation went a terror that something living but alien would make its sudden appearance. It was a new version of the stress of the unknown, which disappeared after counselling - and, of course, after a reassurance that Mars was a dead world, without the possibility of life. For this fear of alien beings I felt that Mr. H.G. Wells and his followers were much to blame. The point I attempted to make was that Mars's role in human thought had been benevolent and scientific - in a word, rational. To this end, I persuaded Charles Bondi to give an address. Although he regarded my attempts to regulate society as a waste of time, he responded readily enough to deliver an exposition of Mars's place in humanity's progressive thought. His speech concluded: 'The great Johannes Kepler's study of the orbital motions of the body on which we find ourselves yielded the three laws of planetary motion. Space travel has come to be based on Kepler's laws. The name of Kepler will always remain honoured for those brilliant calculations, as well as for his wish to reduce to sense what had previously been muddle. 'If we are to remain long enough on Mars, our eccentric friend here, Thomas Jefferies, will try to perform a feat equivalent in sociological terms to Kepler's, reducing to regulation what has always been a tangle of conflicting patterns of behaviour from which, to my mind, creativity has sprung.' Bondi could not resist that final dig at me. Yes, ours was an ambitious task. I saw, as he did not, that it could be accomplished because we were a small population, and one which, as it happened, had been selfselected for its social awareness. During one debate the Ukrainian Muslim YEA named Youssef Choihosla rose and declared that we were all wasting our time. He said that whatever rules of conduct we drew up, even those to which we had readily given universal consent, we would break; such was the nature of mankind.

He was continuing in this vein when a woman of distinguished appearance spoke up to ask him cuttingly if he considered we should have no rules? Choihosla paused. And if we were to have rules, pursued the woman, pressing home her advantage and looking increasingly majestic, was it not wise to discover what the best rules were and then try to abide by them? The Ukrainian became defensive. He had spent his year of community service, he claimed, working in an asylum for the mentally deranged in Sarajevo. He had experienced terrible things there. He believed as a result that what Carl Jung called 'the shadow' would always manifest itself. It was therefore useless to hope to establish even a mockery of a Utopia. You could not pump morality into a system to which it was not indigenous. (A year or two later, interestingly, he would put forward a much more positive viewpoint.) Several voices attempted to answer him. The woman who had previously spoken quelled them with her clear firm tones. Her name was Belle Rivers. She was the headmistress in charge of the cadre children, semi-permanently stationed on Mars. 'Why is there a need for laws, you ask? Are laws not present in all societies, to guard against human "shadows"? As scientific people, we are aware that the human body is a museum of its phylogenetic history. Our psyches too are immensely old; their roots lie in times before we could claim the name of human. Only our individual minds belong to ontology, and they are transient. It is the creatures - our archetypes, Jung calls them - that reside in the unconscious, like your shadow, which act as prompts to the behaviour of the human species. 'The archetypes live in an inner world, where the pulse of time throbs at a drowsy pace, scarcely heeding the birth and death of individuals. Their nature is strange: when they broke into the conscious minds of your patients in Sarajevo, they undoubtedly would have precipitated psychosis. Your psychurgists will tell you as much. 'But we moderns know these things. The archetypes have been familiar to us for more than a century. Instead of fearing them, of trying to repress them, we should come to terms with them. That means coming to terms with ourselves. 'I believe that we must draw up our rules firmly and without fear, in acknowledgement of our conscious wishes. I also regard it as healthy that we acknowledge our unconscious wishes. 'I therefore propose that every seventh day be given over to bacchanalia, when ordinary rules of conduct are suspended.' My glance went at once to the bench where Sharon Singh lounged. She was gazing serenely at the roof, the long fingers of one hand tapping gently on the rail of her seat. She was calm while much shouting and calls for order continued round her. An old unkempt man rose to speak. He had once been Governor of the Seychelles; his name was Crispin Barcunda. We had spoken often. I enjoyed his quiet sense of humour. When he laughed a gold tooth sparkled briefly like a secret signal. 'This charming lady puts forward a perfectly workable idea,' he said, attempting to smooth down his mop of white hair. 'Why not have the odd bacchanalia now and again? No one on Earth need know. We're private, here on Mars, aren't we?' This suggestion was put forward in a droll manner so that people laughed. Crispin continued more seriously. 'It is curious, is it not, that before we have established our laws, there should be what sounds like rather a popular proposal to abolish them every seventh

day? However welcome the throwing off of restraints, dangers follow from it ... Is the day after one of these bacchanalias to be declared a mopping-up day? A bandaging-ofbroken-heads day? A day of broken vows and tears and quarrels?' Immediately, people were standing up and shouting. A cry of 'Don't try to legislate our sex lives' was widely taken up. Crispin Barcunda appeared unmoved. When the noise died slightly, he spoke again. 'Since we are getting out of hand, I will attempt to read to you, to calm you all down.' While he was speaking, Barcunda produced from the pocket of his overalls a worn leather-bound book. As he opened it, he said, 'I brought this book with me on the journey here, in case I woke up when we were only three months out from Earth and needed something to read. It is written by a man I greatly admire, Alfred Russell Wallace, one of those later-borns our friend Hal Kissorian mentioned in his remarkable contribution the other day. 'Wallace's book, by the way, is called The Malay Archipelago. I believe it has something valuable to offer us on Mars.' Barcunda proceeded to read: '"I have lived with communities of savages in South America and in the East, who have no laws or law courts but the public opinion of the village freely expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights of his fellow, and any infraction of those rights rarely or never takes place. In such a community, all are nearly equal. There are none of those wide distinctions, of education and ignorance, wealth and poverty, master and servant, which are the product of our civilisation; there is none of that wide-spread division of labour, which, while it increases wealth, produces also conflicting interests; there is not that severe competition and struggle for existence, or for wealth, which the dense population of civilized countries inevitably creates. '"All incitements to great crimes are thus wanting, and petty ones are repressed, partly by the influence of public opinion, but chiefly by that natural sense of justice and of his neighbour's right which seems to be, in some degree, inherent in every race of man."' Snapping the book shut, Barcunda said, 'Mr. Chairman, my vote is that we have but one law: Thou shalt not compete!' A YEA immediately shouted, 'That's all very well for you DOPs. We young men have to compete - there aren't enough women for all of us!' Again I looked towards Sharon Singh. She was examining her nails, as if remote from intellectual discussion. After the session closed, I talked with Barcunda. We had a coffdrink together. His pleasant personality came across very clearly. I said that it was unfortunate we were not in as favourable a position as Wallace's savages. He replied that our situations were surprisingly similar, sunshine deficiency apart. Our work was not labour, our food was adequate, and we had few possessions. And we had a benefit the savages of Wallace's East could not lay claim to, which was the novelty of our situation: we were in a learning experience, isolated millions of miles from Earth. 'It is vitally important that we retain our good sense and good humour, and draw up an agenda for a just life quickly. We cannot secure total agreement, because the pleasure of some people is to disagree. What we require is a majority vote - and our agenda must not be seen to be drawn up merely by DOPs. That would give the young bucks among the

YEAs an opportunity to challenge authority. They can't go out into the jungle to wrestle with lions and gorillas to prove their manhood: they'd wrestle with us instead.' He gestured and pulled a savage face to demonstrate his point. 'You can't say I'm a very dictatorial chairman.' 'I can't. But maybe they can. Take a day off, Tom. Hand over the chair to a young trouble-maker. Kissorian might be a good candidate, besides having such a fun name.' 'Kissorian goes by favour, eh?' Looking at me poker-faced, Crispin said that he wanted legislation to improve the Martian brand of ersatz coffee. 'Tom, joking apart, we are so fortunate as to have the bad luck to be stuck on Mars! We both see the survival of humanity on a planet on which we were not born as an extraordinary, a revolutionary, step. 'I must say I listened to your five bugbears with some impatience. I wanted you to get to the bugbear we have clearly escaped from: the entire systematic portrayal of sexuality and violence as desirable and of overwhelming importance. We no longer have these things pouring like running water from our television and Ambient screens. I fancy that deprived of this saccharine/strychnine drip, we can only improve morally.' At the next meeting of Adminex (as always, televised for intercom and Ambient), we discussed this aspect of life: the constant projection of violence and sexual licence on media that imitated life. Both Kissorian and Barcunda were coopted on to the team. It was agreed - in some cases with reluctance - that most of us had been indoctrinated by the constant representation of personal assult and promiscuity on various screens, so as to accept such matters as an important part of life, or at least as a more dominant component of our subconscious minds than we were willing to admit to. In Barcunda's elegant formulation: 'If a man has an itch, he will scratch it, even when talking philosophy.' Without pictorial representations of a gun and sex culture, there seemed a good chance that society might become less aggressive. But Kissorian disagreed. 'Sex is one thing, and violence quite another. Barcunda compounds them into one toxic dose by talking of the saccharine/strychnine drip. I agree that it's really no loss that we do not have these activities depicted on TV here, but, believe me, we need sex. What else do we have? Everything else is in short supply. We certainly need sex. You speak as if there were something unnatural about it.' Barcunda protested that he was not against sex, only constant and unnecessary depictions of its various activities. 'It's a private thing,' he said, leaning across the table. 'Showing it on the screen transforms a private thing into a public, a political, act. And so it muddies the deep waters of the spirit.' Kissorian looked down his nose. 'You DOPs had better realise that for the amount of screwing that goes on you'd think we were on Venus.' Kathi Skadmorr's activities as a speleologist had made her the hero of the hour. It was suggested at the end of the meeting that I should coopt her on to the Adminex, if only to make that body more popular. I agreed, but was not eager to have another confrontation with her on Ambient.

We continued our discussion of Crispin Barcunda's saccharine/strychnine drip privately. One of the fundamental questions was whether love and sexuality would become more enjoyable if they retreated into being private things? Without constant representation visually in the media, would not a certain precious intimacy be restored to the act? But how to bring this thing about without censorship: that is, to influence public opinion so that ordinary persons who wished to do so could rid themselves of the poisonous drip, as they had in previous ages rid themselves of the enjoyments of cockfighting, slavery and tobacco-smoking? Crispin said, 'You want to advance towards the betterment of mankind? Maybe it can be done, maybe not! But let's have a try, Tom. After all, it gives our lives here an objective. Betterment means a break with the past - chop, like that! - not just a continuation of it, as would have been the case had the terraformers and realtors had their way. Maybe we can do it. But I'd be against any suspicion that sexuality and eroticism was not in itself one of mankind's blessings. The older I get, and the more difficult sex gets, the more I become convinced it holds the meaning of any valued life.' I could but agree. 'We must try to influence minds. It is important - and not just for our little outpost here. We're not going to be isolated for ever. Once EUPACUS or its successors have been reassembled, once the world economy has picked up, ships are going to be operating again. 'By that time, we must have our mini-utopia up and running. Just to be a shining example to Earth, to which most of us wish to return.' 'Then maybe on Earth, as in good old Wallace's island community, the ideal might be reached, where each man scrupulously regards the rights of his fellow man.' As he spoke, Crispin gazed earnestly and short-sightedly into my eyes. 'Like not shooting him or fucking his wife.' He was a good man. Talking with him, I was convinced we could become a better, happier, humanity - without the pathetic need of saccharine/strychnine drips. 'Now you'd better go and coopt Skadmorr,' he said. 'She'll lower the average age of Adminex by a few years!' I was up early next morning. Runners and the semi-flighted were already about in the streets, exercising. Although we had yet to solve the question of the Martian date line, we had solved the problem of dividing up the days and weeks. Mars's axial rotation makes its day only sixty-nine minutes longer than Earth's day. In the time of EUPACUS, an extra 'hour' of sixty-nine minutes had been inserted to follow the hour of two in the morning. This was the 'X' hour. The other hours conformed to the terrestrial twenty-four. The innovation of the 'X' hour meant that at first terrestrial watches had to be adjusted every day, until an ingenious young technician, Bill Abramson, made his reputation by inserting what he called 'the "X" trigger,' which suspended the momentum of watches and clocks for sixty-nine minutes every night, after which they continued working normally as before. Since an hour is basically the way we measure our progress through the day, there were few complaints at this somewhat ad hoc arrangement. But it did mean that human activity restarted fairly early in the day. Taking in the scene around me, I could only appreciate the change from the city on Earth I had left, with its gigantic byzantine structures housing thousands of people,

walled in like bees in their cells with Ambient connections supplying many of their needs, the facades of these structures awash with pornographic images once sun had set. Below those great ragged skylines, below the coiling avenues, lived the impromptus, subsisting on the city's grime, anaesthetised by the free porntrips overhead. But here, under our low ceilings, was a more hygienic world, where coloured plastic ducts were running in parallel or diverging overhead, with jazzy patterns in rubber tiles below our feet and stylised lighting. Birds flew and called among the plant clusters at every intersection. It was at once more abstract and more human in scale than terrestrial cities. I recalled an exhibition I had attended in my home city hall of the paintings of an old twentieth-century artist, Hubert Rogers. Those visions of the future that had so inspired me as a young man were here realised. I recalled them with pleasure as I hopped on a jo-jo bus. So it was just before six o'clock that I called on Mary Fangold at the hospital for a coffee. I liked to talk over events with this reasonable and attractive woman - and incidentally to visit my adopted daughter, whose implanted leg was now almost completely regenerated. The first person I encountered was Kathi Skadmorr. She was striding out of the gym with a towel round her neck, looking the picture of health. 'Hi! I was watching your discussion of the prevalence of violent and sexual material. I thought you were talking sense for once.' She spoke in a friendly way, regarding me through those dark, lash-frilled eyes of hers. 'What we usually do in private should remain private. Ain't that what you were saying? It's pretty simple really.' 'Bringing about the change is a problem, though. That's not simple.' 'How about telling people to keep it quiet?' 'It's better to get people's consent rather than just telling them.' 'You could tell them, then get their consent. Remember the old saying, Tom: Once you get folk by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.' She giggled. 'So what are you doing here, so early in the morning?' 'I came over from the science unit to see Cang Hai. Then I did an hour's work-out. Are you visiting your daughter?' 'Um, yes. Yes, I am.' She then asked me what I made of Cang Hai's Other, her mental friend in Chengdu. I had to admit I had really not considered it. Her Other did not impinge on my life. 'Nor apparently does your daughter,' she said with a return to her earlier asperity. 'She really loves you, you know that? I believe she has an unusual kind of consciousness, as I have. Her Other may be a kind of detached reflection of her own psyche. Or it may be a little encapsulated psyche within her own psyche, like a - a kind of cyst within her soul. I'm studying it.' At this juncture, Mary appeared. She was direct as usual and told us to enter her office for coffee and a talk. 'But it had better be a brief talk. Say twenty minutes at most. I have a lot to do today.' As we sat down, I asked Kathi if her unusual kind of consciousness was also a 'cyst within her soul'. I used her phrase. 'My consciousness embraces an external. It embraces Mars. It's all to do with the life force. I'm a mystic, believe it or not. I've been down into the gullet, or maybe the vagina, of this planet, into its bladder. I have nothing but contempt for those thirty or however

many it was who committed suicide here. They were prats. Good that they died! We don't want people like that. We want people who are able to live beyond their own narrow lives.' 'They were all victims, cut off from their families,' Mary Fangold said. 'They didn't do their families much good by killing themselves, did they?' She crossed her long legs and sipped at the mug of coffdrink Mary had brought. Almost to herself, she said, 'I thirst for what Tom proposed - the mind set free!' Mary and I started to talk together, but Kathi cut us short, speaking eagerly. 'You should get rid of all this flaunting of sex, as you say. Sex is just a recreation, after all, sometimes good, sometimes not so good. Nothing to be obsessed about. Once you get it out of the way you can fill everyone's minds with real valuable things, mental occupations. Without TV or the other distractions, we can be educated in science in all its branches. We must learn more, all of us. It's urgent. "Civilisation is a race between education and catastrophe" - you remember that saying? Education throughout life. Wouldn't that be wonderful?' Somehow I did not take that opportunity to invite her to join Adminex. I felt she might be too disruptive. However Kissorian asked her a few weeks later. Kathi turned down the offer, saying she was not a committee person. That we could well believe. Kissorian had a piece of gossip too. He said Kathi was having a love affair 'frequently in the sack', was his way of putting it - with Beau Stephens. We thought about that. Beau at this time showed little ambition, and was working on the jo-jos. I realise that I have made little mention in this record of Cang Hai, who had attached herself to me. Certainly she is devoted, and it is hard not to return affection when it is offered without condition. She became increasingly useful to me, and was no fool. Of course she was no substitute for Antonia.

Cang Hai's Account

9 Improving the Individual In hospital I learned to walk with my artificial leg. At first it had no feeling; cartilage growth was slow. Now the nerves were growing back and connecting, giving a not unpleasant fizzy sensation. When I was allowed out of hospital for an hour at a time, I took a stroll through the domes, feeling my muscle tone rapidly return. Attempts had been made to brighten the atmosphere of our enforced home while I had been out of action. The jo-jo buses were being repainted in bright colours; some were decorated with fantastic figures, such as the 'Mars dragon'. Glass division walls were tanks containing living fish, gliding like sunlit spaceships in their narrow prisons. The flowering trees recently planted along the main avenues were doing well. More Astroturf had been planted. Between the trees flitted macaws and parrots, bright of plumage, genetically adapted to sing sweetly. I liked the birds, knowing they had been cloned. Inspired by these improvements, I tried to brighten Tom's spartan quarters. When I was fit enough to rejoin my fellows, I found more confidence in myself, perhaps as a result of my friendship with Kathi. So a year passed, and still we remained isolated on Mars. Our society was composed as follows. There were 412 non-visitors or cadre (all those who were conducting scientific experiments, technicians, 'carers', managers, and others employed permanently on Mars before the EUPACUS crash), together with their children. This number comprised 196 women, 170 men and 46 children, ranging in age from a few months to fifteen years old, plus 62 babies under six months. Of the 2,025 DOPs, 1,405 were men and 620 women, and of the 3,420 YEAs, 2,071 were men and 1,349 women. A visiting inspection team consisted of 9 medics (5 women and 4 men) and 30 flight technicians (28 men and 2 women). Thus the total population of Mars in AD 2064 was 5,958. To which it must be added that two carers, two DOP women and 361 of the YEA women (about one-quarter of them) were pregnant. The population of the planet was, in other words, due to increase by about 6 per cent within the next six months. This caused some alarm and much discussion. Blame went flying about, mainly from the DOPs, although as a group they were not entirely blameless. A pharmacist came forward to admit that the pharmacy, which was housed in the R A hospital, had run out of anti-conception pills, having been unprepared for the EUPACUS crash and the cessation of regular supplies of pharmaceuticals.

After this revelation some DOPs suggested that young people use restraint in their sexual lives. The suggestion was not well received, not least because many couples had discovered that sex held an additional piquancy and that an act of intercourse could be sustained for longer, in the lighter Martian gravity. Nevertheless worries were expressed concerning the extra demands on water and oxygen supplies that the babies would exert. I tried to commune with my shaded half in Chengdu. My message was: 'Once more, the spectre of overpopulation is raising its head - on an almost empty planet!' It was puzzling to receive in return an image of a barren moorland covered in what seemed to be a layer of snow. As I tried to peer at this snow cover, it resolved itself into a great white flock of geese. The geese bestirred themselves and took to the air. They flew round and round in tight formation, their wings making a noise like the beating of a leather gong. The ground had disappeared beneath them. It was all beautiful enough, but not particularly helpful. Tom and I took a walk one evening, and were discussing the population question. A strip of sidewalk along the street was covered with an Astroturf that mimicked growth and was periodically trimmed. This was Spider Plant Alley, renamed after the plants that mopped up hydroxyls, much as Poulsen had said. Throughout the domes, plants were pervading the place. I particularly liked Spider Plant at the evening hour. It was then that the quantcomp that controlled our ambient atmospheric conditions turned lighting low and cut temperatures by 5 degrees for the night. A slight breeze rustled the plants - a tender natural sound, even if controlled by human agency. As I hung on Tom's arm, I asked him when he was going to regulate primary sexual behaviour. He replied that anyone who attempted such regulation would meet with disaster, that sexuality was a vital and pervasive part of our corporeal existence. While other facets of that existence were denied us on Mars, it was only to be expected that sexual activity should intensify. 'You also have to understand, dear daughter, that sexual pleasure is good in itself - a harmless and life-enhancing pleasure.' He looked down at me with a half-smile. 'Why else has it excited so many elders to control it throughout the ages? Of course, beyond the sexual act lie potential ethical problems. With those we can perhaps deal. I mean - well, the consequences of the sexual act, babies, diseases and all those rash promises to love for ever when lust is like fire to the straw i' the blood, as Hamlet says.' We walked on before I added, 'Or, of course, whether both parties give their consent to the merging of their bodies.' I thought of how I was always reluctant to give that consent. Had I, by becoming Tom's adopted daughter, somehow managed to avoid giving that consent yet again? I did not know myself. Though I lived in an info-rich environment, my inner motivations remained unknown to me. 'You are justifying sex simply because it's enjoyable?' I asked. 'No, no. Sex justifies itself simply because it's enjoyable. Sometimes it can even seem like an end in itself.' Silence fell between us, until Tom said - I thought with some reluctance - 'My father spent all his inherited wealth on a medical clinic in a foreign land. I was brought up there.

When I was repatriated at the age of fifteen, both my parents were dead. I was utterly estranged, and put under the nominal care of my Aunt Letitia.' He stopped, so that we stood there in the semi-dark. I held his hand. 'I fell in love with my cousin, Diana - "Diana, huntress chaste and fair", the poet says. Luckily, this Diana was fair and unchaste. I was cold, withdrawn - traumatised, I suppose. Diana was a little older than I, eager to experience the joys of sexual union. I cannot express the rapture of that first kiss, when our lips met. That kiss was my courageous act, my reaching out to another person.' 'Is that what it needs? Courage?' He ignored me. 'Within hours we were naked together, exploring each others' bodies, and then making love - under the sun, under the moon, even, once, in the rain. The delirium of innocent joy I felt ... Ah, her eyes, her hair, her thighs, her perfume - how they possessed me! ... I'm sorry, Cang, this must be distasteful to you. I'll just say that beyond all sensual pleasure lies a sense of a new and undiscovered life. 'No, I'm a dry old stick now, but I'd be a monster if I tried to deny such pleasures to our fellow denizens...' I was feeling cold and suggested we went inside. 'People still think you're some kind of a dictator,' I said, with more spite in my tone than I had intended. Tom replied that he imagined he was rather a laughing stock. Idealists were always a butt for humour. Fortunately, he had no ambition, only hope. Enough hope, he said, lightly, to fill a zeppelin. He repeated, enough hope... Yet in his mouth that last word held a dying fall. That night, when alone, I wept. I could not stop. I wept mostly for myself, but also for humanity, so possessed by their reproductive organs. Our Martian population was slave to unwritten ancient law, multiplying as it saw fit. That pleasure of which my Tom spoke always came with responsibilities. At least the R A hospital could prepare for an outburst of maternity, its original duties being in abeyance. There were no new intakes of visitors to be acclimatised. One ward was converted into a new maternity unit, all brightly lit and antiseptic, in which births could be conducted with conveyor-belt efficiency. Everywhere, there was industry. Existing buildings were converted to new uses. The synthesising kitchens were extended. Factories were established for the synthesis of cloth for clothing. All talents were seized upon for diverse works. During the day the noise of hammering and drilling was to be heard. We would endeavour to be comfortable, however temporary our stay. There was music in the domes. Not all terrestrial music was to our taste, and composers like Beza were sought to compose Martian music - whatever that might be! The more far-sighted of us looked ahead to a more distant future. Among these was Tom. Whether or not he really had hope, he and his committee pressed ahead with his plans to involve everyone in everyone else's welfare. They engrossed him; sometimes I felt he had no personal life. He declared that it was a matter of expedience that the education of young children should be given priority. There I was able to assist him to some extent.

Several committees were elected to formulate with others their hopes and endeavours for a better society. They held colloquia, which began in itinerant fashion, the more appealing ones becoming permanent features of our life. Sometimes they were met with impatience or hostility, although it was generally conceded that conditions in the domes might get rapidly worse unless they were rapidly improved. Improvement was something we strove for. Emerson's remark long ago that people preened themselves on improvements in society, yet no one individual improved, lay at the basis of many endeavours. The mutuality required for a just society implied that we must hope to improve the individual, to fortify him; otherwise any improvements would merely enhance the status of the powerful and lower that of the less powerful, and we would be back with the suppressions so prevalent on Earth. Somewhere in the individual life must lie the salvation of whole societies, or else all was lost. Hard as I tried, I found it difficult to study. If only I could learn more, I told myself, Tom would love me more. Many a time, I would simply sit in a cafe and listen to the music that filled the place. Kathi Skadmorr and I had many conversations. For her, learning seemed easy. She worked with Dreiser Hawkwood and found him, she said, a little overpowering. I thought privately that anyone Kathi found overpowering was worth a great deal of respect. She had become absorbed in studying Olympus Mons. At times, the great volcanic cone seemed to fill her thought. She had submitted a carefully reasoned paper to Dreiser on the Ambient, suggesting a name change. Olympus was a 'fuddy-duddy' name. She had found a better name for it when talking with an Ecuadorian scientist, Georges Souto. He had told her of an extinct volcano in Ecuador, the top of which, he said, because of the oblate spheroidal nature of Earth, was the point furthest from the centre of the Earth. In fact, it was 2,150 metres further from that centre than Everest, commonly assumed to be the highest point on Earth. The sophistry of this argument greatly amused Kathi. When she learned that this defunct volcano was named Chimborazo, meaning the 'Watchtower of the Universe', she campaigned for Olympus Mons to be renamed Chimborazo. The campaign was a failure at first, and Dreiser, she said, was annoyed with her for talking nonsense. Shortly after this, she studied satellite photographs of the Tharsis Shield, and observed - so she claimed - tumbled and churned regolith on the far side of Olympus, as if something had been burrowing there. When she pointed this out to Dreiser, he told her not to waste his time, or she would be sent back to the domes. Many of the pressures extant on Earth - or Downstairs, as had become the fashionable term for our mother planet - had been relieved by our exile Upstairs. The intense pressure of commercialism had been lifted. So had many of the provocations of racism; here, we were all in the same boat, rather than in many jostling boats. In particular, money, the gangrene of the political system, had been removed from play, although admittedly a sort of credit scheme existed, whereby payments were postponed until we were hypothetically returned Downstairs.

After a year or so, this credit scheme had taken sick and died, primarily because we found we could manage without it, and secondarily because we ceased to believe in it. It was deemed futile to approach any individual with ambitious schemes if he or she was miserable. Many people missed or worried about their families Downstairs. Once our communication cards ran out, there was no renewing them, and the terrestrial telecom station was closed down - another feature of the EUPACUS fiasco. Counselling was provided, and the psychurgical group was kept busy. Also effective in healing was the community spirit that had arisen, and a renewed sense of adventure. We lived in a new place, within a new context, the 'different psychological calculus'. One of our colloquia became engaged in the art of making new music: primarily a capella singing, which we raised to high standards. We had brought in home-made and revolutionary musical instruments. The 'Martian Meritorio' was established in time as our great success. But I still remember with affection our solo voices raised in song - in specially written song. No bird flies in the abyss Its bright plumage failing No eye lights in the dark Its sight unavailing The air carries no spark Only this – Only this Where sunlight lies ailing – Our human hopes sailing In humankind's ark The improvement of the individual was pursued in such sessions as body-mindposture, conducted at first by Ben Borrow, a disciple of the energetic Belle Rivers. Borrow was a little undersized man, full of energy, as easily roused to anger as to raucous laughter. He drove and inspired his attendees to believe, as he did, that the secret of a good life lurked in how one stood, sat and walked in the light gravity. Perhaps because the bleak surroundings led our thoughts that way, our Art of Imagination colloquium was always successful. Swift and Laputa, those two satellites, first dreamed of by an Irish dean, that chased regularly above our heads, were used to connect the reality of our lives with the greater reality of which we were a transitory part. A way of knowing ourselves was to relate our lived experience with the flow of language, thought and concepts surrounding us, by which the mundane could be reimagined. 'Know thyself was an exortation requiring, above all, imagination. In this department, the Willa-Vera Composite, one so whippetlike, the other so much like a doughnut, proved invaluable. Hard work along these lines produced some extraordinary artistries, not least the fourpanel continuous loop video abstract entitled 'Dawning Diagram' which, with its mystery and majesty, affected all who watched it. Human things writhed into shape from the molecular, rose, ran, flowered in bursts of what could have been sun, could have been

rain, might have been basalt, died, bathed in reproductive dawns. In another quarter of the screen an old Tiresias read in a vellum-bound volume, tirelessly turning the same page. Everything happened simultaneously, in an instant of time. The aim of the Art of Imagination colloquium was to revive in adults that innocent imagination lost with childhood (although children also enjoyed the programme and gave much to it). 'I know the Sun isn't necessarily square. I just like it better that way.' This remark by an eight-year-old, as comment on his strange painting, Me and My Universe, was later embodied in a large multimedia canvas hung at the entrance of the Art of Imagination Department (previously Immigration). There were those who attended this colloquium who were initially unable to seize on the fact that they were alive and on Mars. So obnubilated were their imaginations they could not grasp the wonder of reality. They needed a metaphorical sense to be restored to them. In many cases, it was restored. Then they rejoiced and congratulated themselves that they were Upstairs. To our regret, the scientists in the main kept to their own quarters, a short distance from the domes. It was not that they were aloof. They claimed to be too busy with research. I accompanied Tom to the station when he went to talk privately with Dreiser Hawkwood. A woman who announced herself as Dreiser's personal assistant asked us to wait in a small anteroom. We could hear Dreiser growling in his office. Tom was impatient until we were admitted to his presence by this same assistant. Dreiser Hawkwood was a darkly semi-handsome man, with the look of one who has bitten deep into the apple of the Tree of Knowledge. Indeed, I thought, noticing that his teeth protruded slightly under his moustache, he might have snagged them on its core. He was much preoccupied with the fact that the paper substitute was running out. 'Predictions are for amusement only,' he said. 'When computers came into general use, there was a prediction that paper would be a thing of the past. Far from it. High-tech weaponry systems, for instance, require plenty of documentation. US Navy cruisers used to go to sea loaded with twenty-eight tonnes of manuals. Enough to sink a battleship!' He jerked his head towards the overloaded bookshelves behind him, from which manuals threatened to spill. Tom asked him what he was working on. 'Poulsen and I are trying to rejig the programme that controls all our internal weather. It's wasteful of energy and we could use the computer power for better things.' He continued with a technical exposition of how the current programme might be revised, which I did not follow. The two men talked for some while. The scientists were still expecting to find a HIGMO. Regarding the science quarters rather as an outpost, I was astonished to see how well the room we were in was furnished, with real chairs rather than the collapsible ones used in the domes. Symphonic music played at a low level; I thought I recognised Penderecki. On the walls were star charts, an animated reproduction of a late-period Kandinsky and a cut-away diagram of an American-made MP500 sub-machine gun. The personal assistant had her own desk in one corner of the room. She was blonde and in her thirties, wearing a green dress rather than our fairly standard coveralls.

At the sight of that dress I was overcome with jealousy. I recognised it as made from cloth of the old kind, which wore out, and so was expensive, almost exclusive. The rest of us wore costumes fabricated from Now (the acronym of Non-Ovine Wool), which never wore out. Now clothes fitted our bodies, being made of a semi-sentient synthetic that renewed itself, given a brush occasionally with fluid. Now clothes were cheap. But that dress... When she caught my gaze, the personal assistant flashed a smile. She moved restlessly about the room, shifting paper and mugs, while I sat mutely by Tom's side. Tom said, 'Dreiser, I came over to ask for your presence and support at our debates. But I have something more serious to talk about. What are these white strips that rise from the regolith and slick back into it? Are they living things?' He referred to the tongues (as I thought of them) we had encountered on our way over to the unit. 'Or is this a system you have installed?' 'You think they are living?' asked Dreiser, looking hard at Tom. 'What else, if they are not a part of your systems?' 'I thought you had established that there was no life on Mars.' 'You know the situation. We've found no life. But these strips aren't a mere geological manifestation.' Hawkwood said nothing. He looked at me as if willing me to speak. I said nothing. He pushed his chair back, rose, and went over to a locker on the far side of the room. Tom studiously looked at the ceiling. I noticed Dreiser pat the bottom of his assistant as he passed her. She gave a smug little smile. He returned with a hologram of some of the tongues, which Tom studied. 'This tells me very little,' he said. 'Are they a life form, or part of one, or what?' Dreiser merely shrugged. Tom said that he had never expected to find life on Mars, or anywhere else; the path of evolution from mere chemicals to intelligence required too many special conditions. 'My student, Skadmorr, seems to believe we're being haunted by a disembodied consciousness or something similar,' Dreiser remarked. 'Aborigine people know about such matters, don't they?' 'Kathi's not an Aborigine,' I said. Tom took what he regarded as an optimistic view, that the development of cosmic awareness in humankind marked an unrepeatable evolutionary pattern; humankind was the sole repository of higher consciousness in the galaxy. Our future destiny was to go out and disperse, to become the eye and mind of the universe. Why not? The universe was strange enough for such things to happen. Dreiser remained taciturn and stroked his moustache. 'Hence my hopes of building a just society here,' said Tom. 'We have to improve our behaviour before we go out into the stars.' 'Well, we don't quite know what we've got here,' replied Hawkwood, after a pause, seemingly ignoring Tom's remark. He thumped the hologram. 'With regard to this phenomenon, at least it appears not to be hostile.' 'It? You mean they?' 'No, I mean it. The strips work as a team. I wish to god we were better armed. Oxyacetylene welders are about our most formidable weapon...'

As we started the drive back to the domes, Tom said, 'Uncommunicative bastard.' He became unusually silent. He broke that silence to say, 'We'd better keep quiet about these strips until the scientists find out more about them. We don't want to alarm people unnecessarily.' He gave me a grim and searching look. 'Why are scientists so secretive?' I asked. He shook his head without replying.

10 My Secret Dance and Rivers for God Some malcontents rejected everything offered them in the way of enlightenment, so impatient were they to return to Earth. They formed an action group, led by two brothers of mixed nationality, Abel and Jarvis Feneloni. Abel was the more powerful of the two, a brawny games player who had done his community service in an engineering department on Luna. Jarvis fancied himself as an amateur politician. Their family had lived on an Hawaiian island, where Jarvis had been one of a vulcanism team. Expeditions outside the domes to the surface of Mars were strictly limited, in order to conserve oxygen and water. The Fenelonis, however, had a plan. One noontime, they, and four other men, broke the rules and rode out in a commandeered buggy. With them they took cylinders of hydrogen from a locked store. A certain amount of hardware littered the area of Amazonis near the domes. Among the litter stood a small EUPACUS ferry, the 'Clarke Connector', abandoned when the giant international confederation had collapsed. The action group set about refuelling the ferry. In a nearby heated prefab shed stood a Zubrin Reactor, still in working order despite the taxing variations in Martian temperatures. It soon began operating at 400° Celsius. Atmospheric carbon dioxide plus the stolen hydrogen began to generate methane and oxygen. The RWGS reaction kicked in. Carbon dioxide and hydrogen, plus catalyst, yielded carbon monoxide and water, this part of the operation being maintained by the excess energy of the operation. The water was immediately electrolysed to produce more oxygen, which would burn the methane in a rocket engine. The group connected hoses from the Zubrin to the ferry. The refuelling process began. As the group of six men sheltered in the buggy, waiting for the tanks to fill, an argument broke out between the Feneloni brothers, in which the other men became involved. Each man had a pack of food with him. The plan was that when they reached the interplanetary vessel orbiting overhead, all except Abel would climb into cryogenic lockers and sleep out the journey home. Abel would fly the craft for a week, lock it into an elliptical course for Earth, allow the automatics to take over, and then go cryogenic himself. He would be the first to awaken when the craft was a week's flight away from Earth, and would take over from the guidance systems. Abel had shown great confidence during the planning stage, carrying the others with him. Now his younger brother asked, hesitantly, if Abel had taken into account the fact that methane had a lower propellant force than conventional fuel. 'We'll compute that once we're aboard the fridge wagon,' Abel said. 'You're not getting chicken, are you?'

That's not an answer, Abel,' said one of the other men, Dick Harrison. 'You've set yourself up as the man with the answers regarding the flight home. So why not answer your brother straight?' 'Don't start bitching, Dick. We've got to be up in that fridge wagon before they come and get us. The on-board computer will do the necessary calculations.' He drummed his fingers on the dash, sighing heavily. They sat there, glaring at each other, in the faint shadow of the ferry. 'You're getting jumpy, not me,' said Jarvis. 'Shut your face, kid.' 'I'll ask you another elementary question,' said Dick. 'Are Mars and Earth at present in opposition or conjunction? Best time to do the trip is when they're in conjunction, isn't it?' 'Will you please shut the fuck up and prepare to board the ferry?' 'You mean you don't bloody know?' Jarvis said. 'You told us the timing had to be right, and you don't bloody know?' A quarrel developed. Abel invited his brother to stay bottled up on Mars if he was so jittery. Jarvis said he would not trust his brother to navigate a fridge wagon if he could not answer a simple question. 'You're a titox - always were!' Abel roared. 'Always were! Get out and stay out! We don't need you.' Without another word, Jarvis climbed from the buggy and stood there helplessly, breathing heavily in his atmosphere suit. After a minute, Dick Harrison climbed down and joined him. 'It's all going wrong,' was all he said. The two men stood there. They watched as Abel and the others left the buggy and went towards the now refuelled ferry. As the men climbed aboard, Jarvis ran over and thrust his food pack into his brother's hands. 'You'll need this, Abel. Good luck! My love to our family!' His brother scowled. 'You rotten little titox,' was all •he said. He swung the pack on to his free shoulder and disappeared into the ferry. The hatch closed behind him. Jarvis Feneloni and Dick Harrison climbed into the shelter of the buggy. They waited until the ferry lifted off into the drab skies before starting the engine and heading back to the domes. Neither of them said a word. Abel Feneloni's exploit and the departure of the fridge wagon from its parking orbit caused a stir for a day or two. Jarvis put the best gloss he could on the escape, claiming that his brother would present their case to the UN, and rescue for all of them would soon be at hand. Time went by. Nothing more was heard of the rocket. No one knew if it reached Earth. The matter was eventually forgotten. As patients in hospital become so involved in the activities of their ward that they wish to hear no news of the outside world, so the new Martians were preoccupied with their own affairs. If that's a fair parallel! Lotteries for this and that took place all the time. I was fortunate enough to win a trip out to the science unit. Ten of us travelled out in a buggybus. The sun was comparatively bright, and the PIRs shone like a diamond necklace in the throat of the